Clay nodded, hoping Payton didn’t ask him to confirm these facts. Because, while that story might have been the one he chose for The Official Clay Harper Biography, it wasn’t entirely accurate. Because—and it still broke his heart to think about—he had returned from rehab (and not your walk-in-the-park seashore retreat either, but an inner-city facility full of ex-cons hooked on Opioids and diseased-looking meth-heads that Tracy knew would scare the bejesus out of him) and he’d stared his ever-loving mother in the eye and told her, “I’ve learned my lesson. Renee got me into this, but I’ll get myself out. I’m ending it with her tonight.”
Except all he had done when Renee answered the phone was let her convince him to pick her up. To talk, she assured him. And when he’d snuck out his window and over to her place, she’d pulled him into her arms, consumed him in the sweet cloud of her perfume, and whispered about a party. “Do you have any idea where I’ve been?” Clay asked her. “No way am I going to some drug rave.” But Renee had a way of talking to Clay that brought him down from even the strongest branches of resolve. He drove her to the party, with the understanding that he would fund her buy, bring her somewhere safe, then make a sober exit.
Except then Renee saw that the party wasn’t a one-room get-together, but a full-on convention—at a renovated mid-rise with condos that hadn’t been leased yet, the lobby full of college students and yuppies in designer clothes and even a few people their parents’ age—and she insisted that the least Clay could do was hang around until her other friends showed. There were, after all, date-rape drugs at these events. Did he want her to fall prey?
It was a hell of a phrase, to fall prey. What could Clay do? For all the changes his rehab counselors had invoked in him, they hadn’t removed his masculine desire to protect a damsel in distress.
Once in the building, they were ushered along by a pair of bouncers into a second-floor condo, where someone took their order in the living room and someone equally sketchy took Clay’s money in the kitchen; and in the bedroom a dealer calling himself Barry Right—an obvious play on the soul singer whose basso profundo was something the dealer had in common—looked Renee up and down, as if to beg her to fall prey, then sneered at Clay with his gold fronts and handed them a package concealed in brown sandwich wrap (noticeably less than what was promised, Clay saw, but did not voice) along with a key card to their own fourth-floor condo.
Up there, behind closed doors, Renee revised the script once again. They had failed to find her friends (and Clay should have known better—Renee never referred to people she did lines with as “friends”) and she told him, “You can’t expect me to do this by myself. People who snort alone have problems. They end up in places like you ended up. Pleeeeeease, love.” Clay had resisted. Of course he had. And Renee had risen to the challenge, kissing him, placing both hands inside his shirt, scratching gently. “I’ve been a good girl.”—Her eyes on him with a gleam he had never seen—“I want you to know I’ve been waiting for you… but I don’t want to wait any more.”
So they had snorted, laughing and singing Ramones songs, doubling the speed that Joey Ramone sang them, and they wrestled on a carpet that no one had ever set foot on, the fibers cushy and full of that new-carpet smell. Though he would have denied it at gunpoint, it was Clay’s first time, eighteen and still flying the scarlet V from his mast, and wasn’t it worth anything to rip it down and set fire to it, to know an orgasm that didn’t involve a self-manipulated palm, to understand what the subtle allusions and inside jokes and endless fuss was about? Floating on the jet stream of potent coke and the tactile pleasure of Renee’s pink-areoled breasts in his hands, Clay thought so. At that moment, he would have died for sex and drugs and… that other thing, the most important thing… which he’d be getting to soon enough. “I’m playing Jack White tunes all the way through now,” he bragged, post-coital, as Renee slid her bare foot up and down his calf. “Remember when I had to look down at my fingers? Now I can sing and play—”
The lights went out.
In the next condo, six to eight people offered a collective groan, and Clay listened to their “Ooooooo’s” a moment before chalking it up to faulty electrical, done fast and cheap—maybe that was why a lot of addicts were occupying these units instead of actual residents. Whatever the cause, Clay hardly cared; he was stiff again, on top of Renee, nibbling at her ear. “Hold up, love. Do you hear that?”
“Yes, that would be my tongue in your ear.”
She pushed him off, suddenly alarmed. “Seriously, listen.”
At first he had no idea what she was talking about and told her as much, in a voice that suggested there was no sound and they both knew it, the same way they both knew she had used her pussy to lure him back to her, to fund her habit and make it their habit again, and it wasn’t cool, dodging his desire, when everything inside him—in both of them—was surging.
Except then Clay did hear something. A muted shout—
A full-on scream. Someone was screaming, running up the building’s stairwell.
Their neighbors laughed again, imagining someone with the baddy-trippies. Then the stairwell door slammed open, and the screams arrived on their floor, in the outer hall, blood-curdling, desperate, and Clay cringed back against Renee. “Is that…?” Renee, muffled under his shoulder, didn’t finish.
Clay knew what she was going to say anyway. The screamer was Barry Right. And hearing that deep voice spike up three octaves might have been funny in almost any context. But in a strange, blacked-out building, not so. It killed their high faster than a police raid.
The dealer pounded up the hall, bouncing off walls, twisting knobs, begging for entrance to one of the condos.
“Oh, God.” Renee grabbed at Clay’s face in the dark. “I didn’t lock the door. Did you? Clay, did you lock the door?”
Clay’s pants were still around his ankles, but they slid mercifully off as he leapt up and sprinted through the unfamiliar rooms, colliding hard with a door frame on his way to the front. If Barry Right had chosen their door first, he’d have surely found it open and forced his way inside to make Clay and Renee a part of his drama. But Barry tried the door on the opposite side of the hall and only moved to Clay’s after he heard the snap of the deadbolt. “Hey, lemme in, motherfucker!” he shouted, punching the door with all his might. “Please! The Queen Bitch on her way!”
Clay stood there, making no move toward the lock, but morbidly curious to see if Barry would burst through the door like the Kool-Aid Man. The dealer employed his substantial shoulder as a battering ram, the door jumped in its frame, but the wood was solid and new and it held. He was backing up, steeling himself for a running leap, when the stairwell clicked open again. And Barry moaned—so hysterically fearful that Clay almost opened the door for the basic decency of it. Almost. An instant later, those high screams took hold of the dark again, tearing at the dealer’s vocal chords as he bolted away.
And just as his screams receded, another sound rose to replace them. Clay had been backtracking to the bedroom when he caught it, the faint dragging—like someone pushing a heavy box along the floor.
And he went back to the door, as if this was all a dream, without terror or consequence, his duty merely to witness.
Mr. Right’s pursuer was advancing through the dark with no sense of urgency. So that there was time for Clay to think twice about what he was doing. To think, I could slip away without a sound. I don’t ever have to see what’s coming.
His eyes moved to the peephole.
It took a long time. An hour that might have been twenty seconds. Finally, something reached his periphery, a black shape darker than dark itself, and Clay immediately wished his brain had been stronger than his eye, that he’d run back to Renee and dragged her into the closet. The shadow—the Queen Bitch, as Barry had so eloquently deemed her—was feminine in shape; Clay understood this even in the limited light. She wore a loose-fitting evening gown and her hair, from what could be gathered, was done up in dreads
that looped and spider-legged around her head. Her body was disproportionately small—a frail scarecrow’s frame that made the gown flap and trail on the floor behind her—to her head, which seemed badly misshapen, a horse head perhaps, but surely not a human one. And when the shadow moved, it wasn’t with a human gait so much as an unbroken slide. Impossible to see her feet in such darkness, but it was almost like she… Like she isn’t touching the floor.
“Clay?” Renee called out with the world’s worst timing. “What’s happening?”
And Clay grit his teeth; his whole body screwed tight as the Queen Bitch halted her progress at their door. No, please, no, no….
The shadow turned knowingly. The inhuman face smiled in at him.
Clay dropped into a crouch, his heart seizing mid-pump. Despite Barry Right’s failure to break and enter, the door between him and the Queen Bitch felt wafer-thin. She would only need to touch the wood to blow it to pieces.
She didn’t breathe and Clay didn’t breathe. The hall was so profoundly quiet that a bigger fool might have throw the door open, just to see if she was still there.
She was, though, Clay didn’t doubt. Barry had made his getaway and someone would have to pay for that. So she was waiting on Clay. Standing there with her gown falling all around her, her wide forehead pressed to the door, and a bottomless black eye, darker even than her shadow, gazing into the peephole, just baiting him to gaze back.
And her hands. Where were her hands exactly?
The thought came too late. Something ice-cold touched his leg, and Clay’s eyes dropped to the gap under the door, where four thin, and impossibly long, white fingers were caressing his ankle. Clay felt her fingernails, as hard and sharp as the teeth of a saw blade, and he cried out.
“Claaaaaaay,” the Queen Bitch whispered to him. “Haaarrrrper….”
Clay’s bladder let go, the urine a hot flood between his bare legs, pooling on the hardwood. The voice was androgynous, alien, and from that moment Clay would always know the fear of the mouse in the trap, the boar in the tiger’s jaws, the innocent man at the bloodthirsty gallows.
I know what you are, he thought distantly, his body going into shock. I know the devil when I see her.
Clay couldn’t have said how much time passed before he realized the Queen Bitch was gone, only that silence had reinstated itself, his limp dick dripping noiselessly.
A moment later Renee grabbed him and he yelped and shot to his feet. “—fucking cops,” Renee was trying to tell him. “Time to bail. Now, Clay!”
She was right. There were sirens outside, panicked voices, their neighbors shouting and arguing over the division of drugs. But the relief of such a mundane predicament broke Clay’s spell. After hearing the devil speak your name, the idea of incarceration was like a slap on the wrist when you’d feared torture and death.
In his mental absence, Renee had collected his clothing, balled in a heap against her chest. “Let me have my pants.”
“There’s no time now, love. When we’re on the street.”
“You’re fully dressed, just give me my pants.”
With her free hand, Renee fought the nearest window open. She had a whole leg out before Clay grabbed her by both arms and shook the bones under her flesh. “You almost got us killed tonight, you selfish fuck!” he shouted into her pale face. And Renee’s brow crumpled angrily, right before she broke down weeping, dropping the laundry at his feet.
A moment later, Clay had his pants on and they were spilling onto the fire escape, clanging downward with dozens of others in various states of dress and sobriety. The first cops to arrive were overwhelmed and unable to control the chaos. Clay hurried Renee past the speeding backup units and didn’t stop until his Jeep was idling safely in front of Renee’s house.
“I’m sorry,” he told her then. “I didn’t mean to call you a selfish jerk.”
“You called me a selfish fuck,” Renee corrected. “I finally offer myself to you, after a year of your selfish attempts, and you insult me?” She gave the air a deeply offended sniff. “It’s fine, Clay,” Then, after several seconds: “You pissed yourself. I stepped in your puddle and almost slipped—but I didn’t insult you for it.”
“You would have pissed too, if you saw what I saw.”
“But I didn’t.” Renee laughed a bitter laugh and shoved her door open. “The mercy fucks are over now, love. Don’t come begging.”
When Clay got home, his mother was waiting for him in his room, with the same concerned expression his father would wear two years later, after his son trashed his bedroom and refused to accept the blame. “It’s over now,” Clay said, and yes, he finally believed himself. “I swear to God it is.”
And his mother had kissed his forehead and gone back to bed.
That, in truth, was how Clay had managed to kick his habit, not Renee never talking to him again, not hardcore rehab or self-discipline, not his mother’s state of love and trust, not finding God—but finding the devil, the Queen Bitch, on the far side of a peephole.
Here he was, though, in therapy, a suspected vandal, a disturbed son, his only friend a famous ghost, and his only friend’s dead girlfriend trying to kill him. It overwhelmed one’s sense of reality. Clay wanted to crank down his La-Z-Boy and bolt out of Payton’s office.
He wanted to go somewhere and get high again.
Silence clung to the room. When it was obvious that his father talked himself out, Payton asked, very calmly, “Peter, you said your wife raised Clay better than he was acting. Do you not feel like you had a part in raising him yourself?”
“Of course I did,” Peter retorted. “It’s just that Tracy was always more than a parent. She was somehow Clay’s friend. I never had that with my parents. They put clothes on my back, provided an education, then sent me on my way.”
“Is that the sort of relationship you want with your son?”
“No.”
“But you don’t think you can achieve the closeness that Tracy did with him.”
“That’s called leading the witness,” Peter said. “I see a young man with his whole life to live, and I want him to know that the difference between success and failure lies in making smart decisions. Walking the line. Do I think I’m getting through to him? Not a bit.”
Payton rested a sandaled foot on his opposite knee and cocked his head. “Then you haven’t observed what I have in this session. You see, every time you’ve accused Clay of something, there’s been a reaction in him. Clay, I’m going to speak for you briefly, and say that you care about what your father thinks. And Peter, you being here tells me that you care deeply for Clay. Really, so many of my father-son patients come in because some third party put them up to it. They have no interest in making anything better. I don’t get that sense with you two.”
“That doesn’t excuse what Clay did to my room,” Peter retorted. “And why have I been doing all the talking? I’m a guest here, not your patient.”
“It does surprise me a little, Clay, that you would make such a dramatic gesture. Doesn’t seem your style. Why wreck your father’s room like that?”
“I don’t know,” Clay said, not failing to note the irony. I really don’t! Go ask the invisible lady who did it! “I guess I’m not ready to accept my mother’s death. Seeing my father with another woman, I was angry—I am angry that you think Mom is far enough in the past.”
“I’m only human,” his father said quietly. “I’m lonely.”
Clay met Peter’s eyes briefly and understood the candor in his words. “I’ll fix your room by the time you’re home tonight. And I’ll see to it that it doesn’t happen again. Because, believe me, I don’t want it to either.”
By the end of the session, Payton seemed pleased with their progress. “Make it a priority to spend time together over the next week. Talk to each other.”
Although if the therapist had instilled a positive vibe between father and son, if a little optimism could be gleaned for their new life on the left coast, it had evap
orated by the time the elevator spit them in the parking lot. “He’s good, isn’t he?” Clay said.
“I don’t trust anyone who wears sandals to work.” Peter scrolled aggressively through his phone. “A professional knows how to dress.”
“Well, we’re not paying him for fashion advice.”
“You’re not paying him at all.” His father shook his head, and Clay saw their fate in that moment: Despite Payton’s observations, there would be no progress made between strangers living under the same roof, no deeper communicating than what had been done in the office today (Clay sensed his father was embarrassed by having expressed himself at all). “I’m late for work,” Peter told him, failing to note the expression on Clay’s face. “Make sure you have my room spotless. And not tomorrow, or a week from now, today.”
They had taken separate cars into Sherman Oaks and were parked on opposite ends of the lot. Clay watched Peter stalk toward his Mercedes. I didn’t do it! he wanted to shout after him.
But sometimes truth was only what you wanted it to be.
9
FEAR OF THE DARK
It took Boyle awhile to show, but Clay made enough of a ruckus in the Generator to rouse him. “I spent all afternoon cleaning the mess she left in my old man’s room,” he said. “The bottle was in sight the whole time. Deidre’s about as interested as a shark in a vegan hamburger.”
Let’s try a different approach, Boyle said.
“I’m not going in there after dark. My head hurts just thinking about it.”
You have the Rick with you?
“In my Jeep.”
Good, then you won’t need to go back inside. When it’s full dark, park yourself out on the back patio and strum a few Throne tunes. Anything you can sing convincingly. As Boyle spoke, the loose plank was once again liberated from the floor and the leather jacket floated up out of the crawl space. Throw this on and go wet your hair in the garden hose. Mess it up like mine used to be. The idea is, Deidre sees me, not you. Keep the bottle in front of you, so it draws her attention.
FAREWELL GHOST Page 9