by Solace Ames
Because of me.
I could have...
What could I have done?
I pushed the Campari away and told myself to cut it. Cut the blame and deal with the now. A scan of the crowd didn’t show any obvious disturbances. I could go looking for someone—where the fuck was Fausto?—or stay here and wait.
I waited, reaching into my purse and clutching my phone so I’d sense its vibration. And after a minute, it shook, and I knew I’d made the right decision.
Don’t worry. Back soon.
I saw Emanuel coming from a long way away, cutting smoothly through the crowd. I didn’t expect to see Derek walking—or limping, actually—behind him.
I hugged my arms around my waist. Emanuel stepped up and stood beside me, loose and relaxed.
Your man is going to fix it.
Everything would be all right.
“I’m sorry,” Derek said in a hoarse and creaky voice. He stank of acrid vomit. There were dark stains on his pants cuffs.
“Be specific,” Emanuel ordered.
“I’m sorry for my in...my uh, my inappropriate comment. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Serena. I’m really, really sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Enough. Amy, do you have anything to add?”
“Fuck off and never speak to me again.” That about covered it.
“Yes, yes, thank you,” Derek whined, backing away.
I turned around, waved for the bartender, asked for a glass of soda and a saltshaker. “You’ve got a stain on your wrist cuff,” I told Emanuel. “Xiomara went to find Miles. I don’t know where Fausto is.” I took up his cuff, poured a dash of soda water on it and some salt, then wiped it off with a napkin. I always liked to be helpful in emergencies...well, if this was an emergency at all. “Is this an emergency?”
“No. A change in plan. Improvisation. Let me know if he ever speaks to you again. He’s been warned of the consequences.”
It didn’t feel right to thank him. Instead, I offered him something of myself. “I cried all night, afterward. I couldn’t look at the mirror for days. And I...I didn’t know what to do, what I could have done.”
He touched my chin. I couldn’t look up from the neat geometry of his wrist cuff, the orderly row of pearl-like buttons. He didn’t force my chin upward, just let his hand trail off and gathered me to his chest instead, so that I could rock against him to the slow beat of his heart.
The rhythm was achingly perfect.
“Cariño. You don’t have to fight alone. Not anymore.”
“I can’t believe it,” I said. God, fuck, damn, I never said the right thing. “I mean, I’m smudging eyeliner on your suit, I can’t believe it.”
Laughter shook his chest. “Bad girl.”
I laughed too, relieved and happy beyond belief, and finally looked up to his eyes. The dark glasses didn’t hide a thing. He was right there behind them, there for me, my rock and my refuge. “Don’t get in trouble for me, okay? That’s all.”
He sighed in mock disappointment. “What did I tell you, hmm? My decision.”
“You said it. I’m a bad girl.”
His hands drifted lower, below my waist. He looked so cold, so forbidding, and the contrast between what everyone else saw and the heat between us drove me to electrified distraction—every rough-shaved hair left on my head stood on end. I’d seen coral blooming at night on some nature show, and that was how I felt right now, a magical cross between animate and inanimate, coming into furious, vibrant life as waves of sensation caressed me.
“If you want to take me anywhere...” I murmured. I didn’t need to finish, didn’t need to say I’m yours or do whatever you want to me, because that was already established beyond any doubt.
“I do.” His lips curled as if holding back a curse of frustration, then returned to an easy smile. “I’d like nothing better. You’ll have to wait, though. On your knees in the bathroom wouldn’t be fitting.”
I pressed my thighs tight together at the wild thought. “I guess not. But that’s your decision.”
“Good girl.”
Oh yes...
A clipped burst of Spanish sounded from behind Emanuel. We fell apart from each other grudgingly. Fausto had returned.
“You’ve got lipstick smears all over your face,” I told him.
“Carajo, how can you tell?” This was the first time I’d seen him even slightly fazed.
“It’s, like, phosphorescent.”
Emanuel nodded, deadpan, to confirm.
We helped Fausto clean off his face with the spare soda. Emanuel checked his phone and found that Xiomara had sent him an all clear message about Miles. The text literally said, Miles all clear. Nothing else.
I wondered if she minded becoming, in such an accidental way, his minder. I could ask Emanuel exactly how they fell apart, and he’d probably tell me.
No. If she wanted to tell me, she could tell me herself.
Once El Tigre came back from seeing Derek out of the club, everyone was accounted for. Then more musicians came by, and the director who wanted to use the new Avert song for his movie, and the director’s loud entourage, and the female rapper who’d covered Fausto in phosphorescent kisses, and I finished my drink, and my accounting went sideways and off a goddamn cliff.
I spilled Campari on Emanuel’s sleeve at one point during the night. He ran his palm over the delightful prickliness of my hair and told me not to worry, that nothing stayed clean in this world, but we could always start over.
When he got me home—home, what a strange word, but a good one—he tied me to the bed and dragged screams out of me that put Gabriel to shame.
I didn’t know who else was in the room next door with Miles. By the end of the night, I didn’t care. I couldn’t care. God, he sent me.
Chapter Thirteen
Rumors of an Avert reunion were confirmed last night when legendary Miles Morrison showed up at the Eispalast opening, alive and kicking—in more ways than one, apparently. The original lineup is back in action, led by the ghostlike guitarist and founder Emanuel de la Isla, known by Hollywood insiders as a Svengali and songwriter. Also in tow were several glammed-up girlfriends, including porn star Serena Sakamoto with a military crop.
“Ghostlike Svengali?” I said, shaking my head. “What do you call that, anti-albinism? And it’s a buzz cut, not a military crop.” I hissed at Emanuel’s phone screen, where I was reading the gossip items from last night, and handed it back to him in a huff.
“You haven’t seen the trick I do with hypnosis rays. They dart from my warlock eyes like lightning bolts.” He stretched against the pillows and wiggled his fingers in front of his face, turning my frown into a giggle.
I joked that I was getting sleepy and curled against him, under the crook of his arm, my forehead pressing against the side of his chest. It was too late in the morning to go back to sleep, but the bed had a gravity all its own, and I couldn’t imagine leaving it yet, or abandoning his touch.
“The man last night—were there worse than him?”
I drew the sheets over my head and pressed tighter against his side, feeling the shape of his ribs underneath the dense muscle. I could count them with kisses. I could tell him anything. “I never got beaten up or raped in the business. I know that’s kind of a low bar.”
“Have you seen that happen?”
He’d never treated me like a victim, so the usual defensiveness didn’t rise up. As much as I hated the business and what it made me do, I wasn’t a victim, and in a way, I was even grateful. “There’s a lot of drugs and abusive relationships. Damaged people. But that’s not just porn, it’s the whole damn city. The whole world.”
“True.”
“My film debut sucked. It wasn’t my first time having sex with more than one guy, so I t
hought it was okay to jump in at the deep end with a gangbang. I started off okay, then I was terrified, then I was uncomfortable, and then I was really depressed. And then I cleaned up and left. I went to the bank and sent a thousand dollars to my mom and used the rest to get my own place so I didn’t have to keep being roommates with a meth dealer, and I went shopping for a surfboard, and I was so relieved. I couldn’t wait to do it again.”
Money meant everything to me back then—joy, freedom, safety, love, everything—because I had nothing without it.
“My life got better, fast. Before, I slept on a lot of floors. Worked a lot of terrible jobs. I mopped fish guts off a factory floor for a few months. I sold ice cream out of a cart on the beach—that was actually awesome, even if it was minimum wage, then my boss fired me because I wouldn’t sleep with him.”
I felt Emanuel’s muscles stiffen against my forehead. Hazy light fell through the sheets, reminding me I couldn’t go back to sleep, and I couldn’t go back in the general philosophical sense either, so I tossed the sheet off my head and sighed unhappily. “Don’t go after him, okay? He’s just some asshole with an ice cream cart.”
“I don’t want you to be frightened of anyone, Amy. Including myself.”
“Should I be frightened of you?” I knew he’d tell me the truth.
“My generation were sicarios in Bogotá. Hired killers for the drug lords. After being displaced from the island, we had little choice for our survival. The older people only knew farming and fishing. They were helpless in their new environment.”
“How old were you?”
“Ten. I couldn’t kill with a gun beyond close range, because of my vision, of course. But our enemies didn’t know that. I served to frighten them. They called me brujo and fantasma, ghost. And I had a machete too.”
“So all of you were like that.” I couldn’t quite absorb what he was telling me, even though I’d been prepared with hints and clues for a long time. He’d killed, and probably in cold blood. But children that young had to be forgiven, right?
“Some of us went to join the guerrillas in the hopes of reclaiming our land. Most of those died. Fausto was the only one who deserted and made his way back to Bogotá.”
“Were you the leader?”
“No. Isabel’s aunt, a deadeye shot, was our leader. I only took over for a short time after she was killed, and searched for a way out. For myself, and then for all of us. My way out wasn’t very different from yours. The old man with the board games? I found one myself. A rich German tourist who became my patron when I was fourteen.”
“Oh God. I’m sorry.”
“I thought of myself as a man by that age, no expectation of innocence. My appearance set me apart. I used that to my advantage.”
I imagined him tall and slender, chest and shoulders not filled out yet, white as snow under the blazing tropical sun, eyes like diamonds. Just the right kind of exotic to be appreciated and collected by a fucking pedophile. “Now I’m the one who feels like killing someone.”
He laughed. It was low and kind of solemn, but it was definitely a laugh. “He’s already dead. I left him after a year, once I could speak German and knew my way around the country. He told me he’d kill himself if I left. Maybe he carried out his threat. Maybe he died of natural causes. I didn’t care. I had more important business—bringing over as much of my family as I could. I came to the United States later.”
“Does it ever get to you, all those—all those bad things? So many people dead. Do you have nightmares?”
“Sometimes. I took medication for a while. Benzodiazepines. Paranoid moments would come over me at unfortunate times, such as meetings with booking agents. I’d begin to silently calculate how quickly I could kill everyone in the room, in order to escape. The medication was prescribed to me for those times. I stopped taking it when I met Miles, and the episodes faded on their own, slowly over the years.”
“Worried about him stealing your pills, I bet.”
“You know both of us well by now.”
“Why did you take him up?”
“In the beginning, it was a cold calculation. I needed a charismatic lead singer. He was there. He was a white man. Therefore, marketable in the genre in a way that none of my family will ever be. Or myself, for that matter. I’m mistaken for white all the time, but rarely for more than five seconds. I can see the moment when they realize. It’s like a light switch coming on, or going off.”
“Five seconds of being white. I never thought of it that way.” The world through Emanuel’s eyes would be hazy around the edges, but maybe he saw more clearly into people’s hearts, even saw the secrets they wouldn’t admit to keeping.
“I don’t make light of those five seconds. Five seconds can mean the difference between life and death.”
I knew exactly what he meant, even though I’d never been mistaken for black or white. “I know Miles went to jail for head-butting a cop that one time. They’d have shot him for sure if he was black.”
He groaned. “I wish I could forget that day. We had to cancel an international tour.”
“Patience of a saint.”
“If I were a religious man, I’d believe he was sent by God to test me.”
“Or Satan.”
“He does have an air of brimstone.”
“What does brimstone even smell like?”
“Miles Morrison’s aftershave.”
I laughed for a long time, because more than the joke being funny, our being here, just like this, lying together so easily, talking about anything and everything as if we didn’t have a care in the world, was comically ridiculous and inconceivably wonderful.
He traced the curve of my short little nose that he always seemed so enchanted with. I curled tighter against him, resting my knee on his thigh. Sheer bliss. I thought this is better than sex, then a second later I realized better than sex was just a generic phrase that meant something was really, really good, but it didn’t matter anyway, because I could have both. With him. No need to compare.
We talked until the sunlight finally pushed us out of bed. We talked about anything and everything. We even talked about the question that threatened us more than sunlight, or blackmail, or wildcats.
Who would watch Miles now?
* * *
The house swelled with more people. Juan Carlos came back, along with his girlfriend Eliska, a professional body piercer. Xiomara moved to a spare room that was once a wine cellar, where we set up a futon couch. I was glad she’d decided to stay the rest of the summer.
She and Miles had established a kind of wary truce during their time at Eispalast. Sometimes I even saw them alone in a room together as I passed through the house, talking quietly, always at least two arm lengths apart—if they stretched out their hands they’d almost touch finger to finger.
In the relatively sober environment of the house, Miles could cope just fine. The only problem was that he never wanted to leave anymore. Not even for sushi, not even for meetings.
“Miles knows what’s best for himself,” Emanuel told me, and maybe he even believed it. I sure as hell wanted to believe it, because now that my sober companion job had become so simple, Emanuel and I could spend as much time as we wanted together.
Maybe I should have questioned that convenient reclusiveness a little more.
Nights were full of traditional music and sometimes dancing, giving the band a creative break from hammering out Avert songs. Cumbia, reggae, folk music. Emanuel tried to accommodate my song requests, even when I got a little silly with them. One night, I asked for industrial, and Miles launched into an improvised parody of “Closer.”
“I wanna fuck you like an ocelot,” he howled in perfect harmony, made mreowing noises and clawed the air until the rest of the band couldn’t play anymore for laughing.
Juan Car
los didn’t hold a grudge against Gabriel. He’d even salute with his scarred right hand as he passed the aviary. “Ocelots are the Jackie Chan of the cat world,” he told me. “They know they are small. So they use clever tactics. We should take him on tour. Hide him in a suitcase so when border guards look for marijuana, they get a big surprise. Ha!”
That reminded me to ask Emanuel about the drug policy for the tour.
“Arrangements will have to wait until after the album release. We’ll have a while to decide,” he told me over our morning coffee in the outdoor kitchen, both of us still with wet hair from our cold, refreshing morning swim.
We. The word felt good, like home. Even though we’d be leaving here soon and drifting to some other part of Los Angeles, our leaving wouldn’t alter how close I held that word to my heart.
“Pot isn’t a big deal, at least where it’s not illegal,” I said. “I guess the main thing is keeping certain people away from Miles. Making it easier for him.”
“I hate cocaine more than anything. If I see the packet of white powder, it’s always stained with Colombian blood in my mind.”
“I did it once. It made me feel like a hummingbird with a broken wing. Not for me.”
“I used it often when I was a child.”
We shared pieces of ourselves at a natural rhythm. I told him about the sisters who wouldn’t talk to me, and the father I’d cut out of my life with a surgical scalpel, and the old woman who’d kept me locked in the garage when I wasn’t at school. I didn’t remember her as an enemy. She came from a bad place and thought she was doing good by my family, keeping me safe, because I was “fast” and I needed to focus on my studies. She’d tell me that all the time. I never understood what fast meant, and her English was rough, so maybe she didn’t either. I just knew it was the word that meant I couldn’t have a normal life, that I had to stay alone, alone, alone, always.
Except for the music.
I was surrounded by music now.
* * *