by Sara Gran
“Just go to hell,” Chloe murmured.
“They’re already here,” CC said.
50
San Francisco
BIX WOKE ME UP at two the next day. I looked at the comic book. The Cynthia Silverton story in here was entirely different—it was the one where Cynthia’s crazy aunt Eleanor comes to visit and her girl-servant gets murdered. Bix had a pot of green tea on a little tray. That was a thoughtful way for a man to kick you out in the morning. We sat in the living room and drank tea. The girl was gone.
“I have shit to do,” he said. “Sorry.”
“Thanks for the tea.”
“You’re welcome. Got any plans for the day?”
“Not really,” I said. “I gotta be back in Oakland tonight for a show.”
“Who you seeing?” Bix asked.
“This guy who I think might have murdered someone,” I said. “This guy I knew. I used to go out with him. That’s who he murdered.”
“Oh,” Bix said, wrinkling his brow. “Sorry.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”
I sipped my tea and waited for the pity to sink in. It did.
“If you want,” Bix said. “You could read some more comics. I mean, I don’t know about all day, but a few hours.”
“Really?” I asked. “Are you sure?”
“Sure,” Bix said, relenting. “Why not?”
When all this was over I’d give Bix Manipulation Resistance 101. For now, I stuck around and read the comics.
I read for a few hours. Reading the Cynthia Silverton digests was like falling into a black hole of memories.
At six I took Bix out to an early dinner at his favorite restaurant, a vegan soul food place in downtown Oakland. We talked about the girl he was dating.
“If you like her that much,” I said, “just do what it takes to keep her, okay?”
“Well, it’s not that easy,” he said.
“It is,” I said. “It really is.”
Bix frowned. I excused myself and went to the bathroom and did a long line of coke off the top of the toilet.
Would it really have been that easy? Was anything ever that easy? It seemed so now. Now that everyone I loved was gone, it seemed like it would have been so easy to keep them.
Someone banged on the door. I ignored them.
“Claire? Uh, Claire? Are you okay?”
Because he wasn’t ready. Because better things were waiting for him. Because I thought if I set him free, he would fly off to some better nest, where someone better than me would love him, where someone better than me would stay with him.
Someone banged on the door again and I didn’t answer and then it was the police and they were breaking the door down. I paid my bill and was escorted out with a stern warning and a brief lecture. Bix was gone.
Because we’d all been handed heaven on a silver platter, and instead we’d kicked it away and asked for hell.
I parked my car in front of a dirty little club on the border of Oakland’s downtown and Chinatown. I dug the little bag out of my purse and used a credit card (Discover; name of Juanita Velasquez; enrolled in Delta Skymiles and Comfort Rewards; no criminal rec-ord) to scoop out a little more coke. It smelled awful, like nail polish remover. I wondered how anything could taste that bad. Cow tranquilizer. Canine antibiotics. Baby monkey cough suppressant.
Scorpio Rising weren’t very good. The opening act was atrocious, which made Scorpio Rising much better than they might have been. That still didn’t say much. A kind of rehashed punk deal. Maybe it was supposed to be ironic in some way I didn’t get. It was likely there was a lot I didn’t get, both in general and especially that night.
But despite not being good, they were good. The crowd loved them. People were having fun. They were beautiful young men, and as the night went on they took off their jackets and then their shirts. The singer sprayed beer out from his mouth to the crowd. The drummer threw his sticks at the audience. Everyone was so young, it seemed amazing they were allowed out of the house by themselves. But when I was their age I’d already been on my own for years.
The first guitar player and singer were better looking than the others, and well aware of it. I didn’t see Lydia going for that type. Too slutty, too unsubtle. The drummer pounded away, angry and methodical. He didn’t smile. No. The bass player never stopped smiling—he was a little younger than the others, and stuck out his tongue at the audience a few times. He couldn’t stop laughing. Also no.
That left the other guitar player. He was likely just under thirty. He played a black imitation Les Paul. He had that thing girls liked in guitar players—concentration, absorption, dedication. I didn’t know if women liked it because it implied the man could pay that same attention to her, or because it meant the man was capable of ignoring her so completely that she could believe the worst about herself.
The guitar player was good-looking enough, and sexy, but no heartthrob. He looked dirty. He had dark hair that he’d slicked back but kept falling in his face. He wore a wifebeater shirt that showed off homemade tattoos: streets or jail. Or maybe kids paid five hundred bucks an hour for tattoos like that now. But from the way he held himself I guessed streets. I noticed he kept his back to the wall, and his shoulders and brow stayed tense.
Toward the end of the set the singer introduced the band. They’d all adopted the last name Scorpio. Cute.
“ . . . And on rhythm guitar—”
The drummer tapped out a drumroll.
“—Rob Scorpio.”
Getting backstage was not a big production. You just walked over and went backstage. I was the oldest person in the club by a hundred years. The band was drinking beer, hyper and high from the stage, comparing notes on the show, laughing excitedly.
Everyone except for Rob Scorpio.
I saw a door against the back wall. DO NOT OPEN. ALARM WILL SOUND.
I walked past the band, unnoticed, and pushed the door. Silence. Outside was Rob Scorpio, smoking a cigarette. He wasn’t smiling.
“Do you have another one?” I asked. “I left mine in the car because you can’t smoke anywhere here. But here we are and I think you can smoke.”
He nodded and held out his pack. Natural Native No-Additives Only-Gives-You-Good-Cancer Lites. I took one and he lit me up.
“Thanks.” I leaned against the wall a few feet away. “Hey, are you Rob?”
He raised a slow, sad eyebrow at me. His desire to be someone he was not was painfully clear. That and something more—something so heavy on him, he couldn’t lift his eyes to meet mine.
The guitar player in the drawing room with the gun.
My heart raced and adrenaline cleared my head, sobering me up.
“I think you know my friend,” I said. “Lydia. Lydia Nunez?”
He looked a little to the left of my eyes.
“No,” he said.
“I think you do,” I said. “I think—”
“I don’t,” he said. He looked at me and threw his bottle on the street, vaguely in my direction. It didn’t break but instead landed with an unsatisfying thunk. Then he turned and went back inside.
I picked up the bottle. The singer came out to start loading gear into their van. He looked at me.
“There’s a sip left!” I said. I took my beer bottle and went back to my car.
In my car I drank the last sip of beer and put the bottle in my purse and did a little coke, feeling sleep crushing in, and checked my phone and waited.
When Rob and the drummer came out an hour or two later I would follow them back to wherever Rob Scorpio lived. My plan failed. I started up too close behind them and they saw me. The singer, who was driving, slammed on the breaks and two Scorpios came out of the van, one holding a bat. I threw the car into reverse and sped away. Apparently bats were the weapon of choice in Oakland.
Back at home I carefully took Rob Scorpio’s beer bottle out of my bag and set it up on my desk. Then I took out the Cynthia Silverton comic I’d borrowed from Bix. I ful
ly planned on returning it. Someday. From a drawer I got out a fingerprinting kit.
I went to my file cabinet and took out Lydia’s fingerprints. I didn’t take fingerprints of everyone I met, but if it seemed like I would know them a while I asked for a set. Some people didn’t like it, but then you had to wonder what they were hiding.
Lydia’s heart center was scarred, a little line right in the middle of her thumb. Her Whorl of Love was overdeveloped, unsurprisingly. But her Arc of Compassion was strong. That did surprise me.
Carefully, slowly. I used a sheet of sticky paper to lift Rob Scorpio’s fingerprints off the beer bottle. I printed them onto a card and labeled them with his name and the date.
Poor kid. Everywhere you looked, broken lines, scarred swirls. No fully-shaped Destiny Whorl. Nothing of his own. But if he wanted to he could turn it around. Prominent Wheel of Forte.
I had the prints I’d collected from the house. Most were useless but a few were solid enough for comparison.
I looked at the piles of prints. Matching them up was supposed to be meditative. Part of the process. It seemed like a big fucking drag.
I emailed the prints with instructions to Claude. Then I called Andray.
“Hey,” I said. “I was just wondering if you’re okay. And, you know, Mick. Just wondering if you’d seen him or whatever. I don’t know if he’s in therapy or anything like that. I don’t know. I think I mentioned this before, but my caseload here is nuts. It’s, like, really crazy. If you ever wanted a job or anything.”
I rubbed my nose and a smear of blood came away.
I got off the phone and then somehow I was at the Shanghai Low. I went into the office with the bartender, Sam.
“Is this that stuff cut with the cow tranquilizer?”
He took a long, shivering snort. He wasn’t shy. When the bar closed we went to a closed Chinese restaurant across the street, which the restaurant workers made into an informal after-hours bar at night. A cook Sam knew from Imperial Palace bought us a round and then we bought him one. Paul took me here once. He’d lived in San Francisco longer than me and knew secret spots, privileged corners.
The sun came up but no one saw it through the fog until the morning guys came in to get the restaurant ready for the day and kicked the night shift out. In front of the restaurant Sam tried to kiss me.
“Are you kidding?” I said. The inside of my mouth tasted like dirty cardboard and my teeth felt like sandpaper.
When I got home it was noon. Claude was in my place. I was grinding my teeth and my eyes were wide but I was ready for bed.
“Hey,” he said, used to a range of states of disarray in his employer. “I checked all those prints.”
“And?” I asked.
“And this guy,” Claude said. “He was in the house.”
“Where?” My teeth were trying to wear each other down, grinding each other into oblivion.
Claude looked at me. “The refrigerator,” he said.
“Fuck,” I said again. The refrigerator was an intimate place in a house. A casual visitor rarely touched it. I realized I hadn’t blinked in about nine hours. I blinked, feeling my lids drag against dry corneas, and took off my jacket and my shoes.
“He was there,” I told Claude. “We need to find him.”
“He could have been there anytime,” Claude said as I walked into the bedroom. I took off my jeans and sat in bed, pulling the blankets around me.
“He was there,” I said.
“How do you know?” Claude asked.
“Because we trust one thing,” I said, wondering if a small black cat was running around the apartment or if I was seeing things. “And only one thing, ever, and never forget this okay? There’s only one thing that you can trust. You know what it is, right? Tell me you know what it is. Tell me you get it. Because if not, I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
“The clues,” Claude said. “We trust the clues.”
“Yes,” I said. Worlds were born and spun and crashed before my eyes. “Yes. Yes.”
“And you,” Claude said. “I trust you.”
“No,” I said. “Don’t. Never trust me, or anyone else. We’re all assholes. Especially me. Only the clues.”
And again I remembered:
Remember. The Case of the End of the World.
51
Brooklyn
I SLEPT UNTIL NOON the next day. My parents were out. I made coffee and smoked a cigarette and called Tracy.
“We forgot about school,” I said.
“Oops,” she said.
At about two she came over and we watched Hawaii 5-O and then Columbo. We wore the same clothes we wore last night and we smelled like Hell, like blood and disinfectant and stale beer. I made us coffee with big shots of amaretto from my parents’ liquor cabinet, and Tracy made grilled cheese sandwiches. She made really good grilled cheese. After sandwiches we went back to the TV. We watched Sally Jesse Raphael and Three’s Company and Hart to Hart. Mrs. Hart was kidnapped. Again. Max and Mr. Hart found her. Big fucking surprise, Max. Try our case and see how you like it.
In the evening we walked up to Brooklyn Heights. On Hicks Street we got wonton soup and lemon chicken and mai tais at SuSu’s YumYum. The walls were covered in scratchy red velvet and we sat in red and black chairs.
“I wish we could live here,” Tracy said. She meant the design, which was already pleasingly retro. But I think she also meant the quiet and the kindness and the never-ending supply of food. Tracy’s father meant well, but the kitchen was usually empty.
“My dad got laid off again,” she said when we were almost done eating. She looked down at her plate, the remains of lemon chicken and fried rice.
We both knew what would happen: He’d start drinking earlier and earlier, more and more, until he was drunk all day, every day. Then he’d realize what he’d done, sober up, apologize to Tracy, and start looking for a job again. Then he’d start drinking again.
“That sucks,” I said. “You can always stay with me.”
“Thanks. But then, you know. I worry if he’s eating. He falls. You know.”
From SuSu’s we went to a bar we liked across the street that had a padded door with a porthole-like round window like bars in old movies. After mai tais we figured we should stick to beer and got big pints of Genny at the bar. We smoked cigarettes and put Frank Sinatra songs on the jukebox. At the bar a few old men argued about sports or politics or whatever old men argue about.
“I don’t understand,” I said, once I was finally drunk enough to talk about Chloe. “I mean—”
But I didn’t know what I wanted to say.
“I know,” Trace said. “I mean—”
But she didn’t know what to say either.
At midnight we went home. We kissed good night on the cheek, but it felt cold. At home I took off my dress and put on a big Ramones T-shirt over my tights and got into bed and drank amaretto from a stolen bottle I kept underneath. I put on the TV. Unsolved Mysteries was on.
I couldn’t sleep. I thought about Chloe. About how Chloe had been the one person. About how solving mysteries had been the one thing. How Chloe didn’t want us and the mystery, her mystery, didn’t want us to solve it.
It felt like the inside of my body was a desert. A dead place.
I got out my notebook and wrote: Someday this will make me a great detective. Someday this will make me a great detective.
But it didn’t seem true anymore. If you were really devoted to the truth you had to admit that there wasn’t much of a point to it all. Not without the one thing that had made sense, at least a little. Not without solving mysteries.
Under my pillow I had four codeine pills from when I’d broken a tooth on the Case of the Broken-Into Bodega. When I saw the dentist I told him I didn’t want any painkillers—they made me feel funny—and it worked: he gave me fifteen pills. The first one had been heaven; the next ten had each been progressively less wonderful, tolerance already building.
I took the f
our I had left and washed them down with the rest of the bottle of sweet liqueur.
When I fell asleep I dreamed I was dead.
I was in a black, barren lot. It could have been a city that burned down or a forest that died.
I lay on the dirt like a doll, broken and forgotten, shattered glass glittering around me. My eyes were closed, my lips were pale and blue.
Days passed. Ages passed. I was dead for years. I was dead for centuries.
Slowly, barely there, I felt something push my arm. It pushed again and again.
I wondered if it would hurt me.
It did. It pushed hard and then harder.
Pain never ended, apparently. So that was the big reveal, after all that.
I felt something scrape on my hand and I realized it was teeth, or a hard mouth, gently biting on my hand, my arm, not breaking the skin.
I felt the hard mouth on my neck, brushing the skin. The mouth searched and found the neck of my dress, and grabbed it.
The thing with the hard mouth pulled on my dress, and dragged me away.
The thing dragged me for hours. Maybe years. My eyes were closed but I felt my dead body roll over sharp rocks, broken glass.
Finally, we stopped. The thing let go of my dress.
All of a sudden I felt a hot breath and the strangest sensation on my face, something rough and wet, like damp sandpaper, rubbing over and over again. The rough wet thing reached my eyes. It poked gently at my eyelids, pushing again and again until my eyes were open.
I could see. Above me was a huge black bird with a red featherless head, cleaning my face. The bird leaned back.
I sat up. I was alive.
We were in a forest. Moss carpeted the ground. Ferns bloomed underneath giant trees with rough red bark.
We looked at each other. The bird had tiny black eyes that saw everything.
It bent down low. It smelled like dirt and dead things. Its feathers were black-brown and dull.
It whispered in my ear.
“This is not the price you have to pay. This is not your punishment for loving something.”