Then they saw, a little ways off, maybe two hundred feet or so, the yellow light of a flashlight traveling along the ground, and they saw the shadows of legs, a few people walking up the path to the parking lot. Fred wasn’t sure how much time had passed.
“Fred?” Lana whispered. “I’m kind of freaked out now.”
Fred shushed her. “Let’s just be quiet and wait for them to go.”
They couldn’t hear what was being said, but the dominant voice was of a man who sounded angry. There was a woman, and it sounded like she was crying. They watched the beam of the flashlight move along the ground, up the path and into the parking lot. The light shut off, and after what felt like a very long time, they finally heard car doors slamming. The white pickup truck in the parking lot. Then somebody trying to start an engine. It took four or five attempts, four or five times the truck made an ugly chattering noise and died before they heard the froom of the engine coming on. Then there was the sound of heavy tires rolling on gravel.
“Huh,” said Fred. “Weird.”
Silence.
“I think we should go,” said Lana. “Actually, yeah. I want to go.”
Silence.
“Actually I want to go right now, Fred.”
“Yeah. Fine, okay,” said Fred. “Okay. Right. Yeah. Let’s go.”
They had trouble finding the path again, though. They had wandered farther into the woods than Fred had thought, and while Lana had been running around in the grass and he was busy taking pictures, it turned out neither of them had been paying much attention to where they were. After walking for a while in the general direction of where they thought the path was, they realized they were in a place neither of them recognized. The trees were closer together here. It didn’t look familiar. Fred was shining the flashlight on the ground as they walked and Lana kept close beside him, behind him. They walked for a while more before they came into a small clearing in the woods where there was a man lying in the dirt in a puddle of blood. There was blood trickling freely from the man’s head. He had spat out some teeth, which were lying next to his head. Fred trained the flashlight on his head, framing it in the annulus of pale yellow light, and they saw that his eyes were open, though one of them was caked in blood and swollen almost shut. He was alive, and awake, and breathing, though there was a sort of gargling noise in the back of his throat as air whistled in and out of it. He was a big guy, tall and thick, probably weighed more than two fifty, could have been three hundred easily. His lower jaw hung open. The man pushed the blood out of the corner of his mouth with his tongue. He tried to speak, but whatever he was trying to say came out unintelligible. He coughed on the effort to force up words and spat some blood. He was wearing yellow rubber boots.
“Can you. Um. Jesus, dude.” Fred cleared his throat. “Can you move?”
The man shook his head, slightly: No.
Fred was kneeling beside the man with the flashlight. He clicked it off and heaved to his feet. He stood the tripod on the ground to rid his arms of it. Fred looked up into the sky. It swarmed with stars.
Fred looked at Lana. She was standing far away from the beaten-up man, eyeing him with terror, and covering her breasts and her crotch with her hands, looking like Eve walking out of Eden. Fred had forgotten about that.
“We have to call nine-one-one,” she said.
“Exactly. That’s a wonderful idea, my dear,” said Fred. “So, just curious, here: What were you doing trespassing in the park in the middle of the night, Fred? Well, you know, Officer, I was just getting my sixteen-year-old niece stoned and drunk and then we came out here to take naked pictures of her. Nothing wrong with that, is there?”
“This is art.”
“This is art, goddamnit. You expect the cops to get that? I can just see it. Oh, I’m sorry, Fred! Here we were gonna book you for supplying drugs and alcohol to a minor, driving drunk, probably, trespassing on government property, and, and, uh, and child pornography! Looks like we can scrap that last charge, boys. We didn’t realize this was just some tasteful erotic art photography you’re doing here.”
“So we should leave him here and not tell anybody?” said Lana.
“Well—” Fred started, and stopped.
“This guy’s head is like, bashed in. He can’t even move. If we leave him here he’ll die. We have to help him.”
At this point the man on the ground tried to say something, but he choked, coughed, spat up a sluice of blood, and was silent. Fred waddled into the middle of the clearing, the flip-flops slapping under his heels. He crossed his arms. He was still holding the flashlight. Fred was thinking. His breathing was pained and heavy. The temperature had dropped a few degrees.
Fred set the flashlight down in the grass, went over to the man on the ground, and grabbed his hands. Fred yanked hard on his arms, trying to move him. The man growled in pain.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Lana said, or more half screamed.
Fred didn’t answer. He yanked on the man’s arms again and succeeded in moving the body an inch or so. The man grunted. A violent convulsion rumbled through him. Fred huffed and blew out some air, looked up at Lana. She looked back at him. Fred sopped his face with the corner of his shirt and blinked a few times.
“Well, princess, you gonna stand there and watch, or help me move him?”
“Move him where?”
“To. The. Fucking. Car,” said Fred.
“What?”
Fred dropped the man’s arms to explain. He spoke slowly and melodically because what he was saying was so obvious. “We’re going to drop him off in front of the door at the hospital and then get the fuck out of there.”
Lana laughed, theatrically.
“That,” she said, “is such a bad idea.”
Fred snorted and picked up the man’s arms again.
“We won’t even be able to drag him up there,” she said. “Look at this guy. He’s fucking huge. There’s no way we’ll get him all the way up that hill.”
“Not by myself we’re not. Come on, princess. I get the hands, you get the feet.”
“No,” she said.
Fred dropped the man’s arms again. He’d only been able to drag the man a few inches, and now he seemed to be in much more pain than when they’d found him. The exertion had left Fred out of breath. He braced himself against a tree.
“Fine,” said Fred, turning to her again. “We go home. We clean up. Wash that shit off you, get some clothes on, then we call the cops and give like an, uh. I dunno. Give an, an anonymous tip or something, I guess. I guess that’s the best thing to do.”
Lana nodded.
“Fine,” she said. “But now we’ve still got to get back to the path.”
“Easy, hon. We just follow this trail of blood.”
Fred had meant it as a joke, except it wasn’t a joke. The man on the ground was gurgling and moving around, trying desperately to say something to them as they left the clearing, Fred carrying the camera and flashlight and the bag full of film and camera equipment, Lana carrying the tripod. Fred held the beam of the flashlight shivering on the ground in front of them. There was so much blood on the stalks of grass, it really was easy to see where those people had come from, and whoever that guy’s assailants were, they apparently had a better sense of direction than Fred, because by following the blood they quickly got back on the trail and started back up the hill. Fred walked sluggishly on the way back, snorting and puffing up the trail in his flip-flops, and Lana stayed close by him. They made it back to the parking lot. The white pickup truck was gone, but now there was another car in the lot. It looked like a service van for a pool cleaning company, with a bunch of equipment strapped to the roof rack and a picture of a mermaid holding a pool net on the side. They didn’t comment on it. They got in the car, and shortly after that Fred was piloting the vehicle back down the hill along the narrow dirt road, and again they were shuddering over the washboards.
Neither of them said anything. The stereo played Ornette Col
eman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come. The tension in the music came from the jittery energy of the rhythm section mixed with that threnodic sound of the horns. Lana curled herself into a fetal ball, her knees squeezed to her chest and her arms wrapped around her ankles. Her face was turned away from Fred, looking out the window.
Fred ended the silence.
“You know,” he said. “I am not happy.”
She didn’t say anything.
As they rounded a curve and approached the turnoff to the main road, Fred saw the flashing red and blue lights of a police car on the trunks of the trees by the roadside. The white pickup truck they had seen in the parking lot was parked across two lanes of traffic, and two long lines of cars, headlights glaring and engines idling, were stacked up bumper to bumper on either side. A man and woman were sitting on a grassy berm to the side of the road with their heads between their knees and their hands cuffed behind their backs. Another man was standing with his legs planted apart and his palms flat against the side of the truck, and a cop was frisking him with one hand and holding a radio to his mouth with the other.
Fred stopped the car.
“What,” Lana said in a sleepy voice. Her eyes blinked open. Had she been asleep?
She looked at him over her shoulder, still curled away from him toward the window.
“You gotta get out of here,” Fred informed her, in a thin voice that was shrill and sick with panic. “You gotta get out of here right now before anybody sees you, those cops are gonna want to talk to me. I can’t have you in here. They’ll throw me in jail if they see you in here like that. Way way way way way too much to explain to the cops. Get out. Please please please get the fuck out of here right now please.”
“What? Where am I gonna go?”
“I don’t know. I don’t fucking— I don’t know, uh—”
The cop seemed to be looking in their direction. Fred cut the headlights, and then the cop was really looking at them.
“Wait,” said Fred. “Wait wait wait wait, okay. I know. I got an idea. Go up there and hide in that cannon. Nobody’ll ever look in there.”
“What?”
“You know the cannon in the parking lot on top of the hill? Commemorating the slaughter of Indians or whatever, hide in there, hide like in the barrel of the cannon, you’re skinny, you’ll fit in there and then I’ll know exactly where to find you when I come back and if they throw me in jail I’ll use my one call to call up my buddy Craig, and he’ll come get you. I’ll tell him where to find you but I don’t think that’ll happen because I’m basically pretty much sober now anyway and I can talk my way out of this, just please please please please get the fuck out right now.”
Lana got out of the car, slammed the door, and ran back up the hill along the dirt road. When she slammed the door the cop down on the road looked up and aimed his flashlight in Fred’s direction. Fred turned the headlights back on and eased the car forward.
• • •
She did like the dark. She didn’t make the Platonic mistake of associating the good and the beautiful and the light with the truth. That was saccharine and deceptive, like using a euphemism for something more accurately expressed in grubbier, more direct language, like saying “passed away” instead of “died,” or “make love” or “sleep with” instead of “fuck.” Her parents’ house in California vibrated softly all over with fake sweetness and light. She hated their money, hated their tasteful well-matched furniture, hated their sterile Thanksgivings. After Lana learned the word bourgeois she took enormous pleasure in applying the adjective to her parents. Lana was more interested in darkness and ugliness—the juice of life, the life/death force, the yin/yang, the eros/thanatos, the duende. She wanted to do and to have, in part to do and to have and in part to have done and to have had. She wanted to be a bohemian. Like Baudelaire. She wanted to be bisexual, and maybe commit suicide after doing or creating something brilliant. But at this particular moment she wished she were in her parents’ house in California, taking a tropically steamy shower, sneaking a glass of wine, and blazing through the satellite channels on her parents’ TV. Then she would sneak another glass of wine, smoke a joint, surreptitiously blow the smoke out the bathroom window, light incense, and read the diaries of Anaïs Nin in bed.
Lana had, in fact, found the cannon with the plaque on it again, but the opening of the barrel was so narrow that no one but an infant could have possibly fit in it. And then she had thought she heard somebody coming, so she ran into the woods and immediately proceeded to get lost. She walked through grass and woods, in a part of the country she had never been before; she could not have even located her position within a hundred miles on a map. She was alone. An hour ago, all her blood had been singing with the wildness and wickedness and novelty of everything she was doing. The silver paint on her skin reflected the moonlight. Her body glowed with otherworldly light and darkness yawned all around her.
She walked slowly. Twigs and rocks drove horribly into her bare feet. She walked on the edges of her insteps to minimize their surface area. Maybe because the alcohol was burning out of her system, the air began to feel much colder. Goose bumps prickled her body beneath the paint.
She had no way of telling time, but she guessed that hours were passing. She lay down in the grass. She stared at the ground, curled into herself like a snail, hugged her legs to her chest, flesh against flesh, warmth to warmth. She was exhausted: There was sand in her veins, all her inner machinery slogging along at half its regular rhythm. And she was hungry. She was very hungry, a sucking hollowness clawing at her gut. She didn’t exactly feel drunk, not anymore, but the universe pitched around like a ship in a storm when she shut her eyes. Yes. No. Yes. She was still drunk. She lay on the ground and looked up, imagined that gravity had inexplicably reversed itself, that her back was pressed against the ceiling of the sky and the clouds she saw were sailing over mountaintops six miles below her. She couldn’t lie down anymore; being still nauseated her. She had to stand up and move around. She got up, and all the blood gushed into her brain. She felt acutely conscious of her internal organs sloshing around in her body, everything out of balance and out of time. She might have fallen asleep. She couldn’t tell. The stars had shifted positions, the moon had moved. But it was still dark, and she had nothing to hold on to, mentally or physically, figuratively or literally. She tried to remember what had happened, but only decontextualized blots of memory remained of the night, certain noises, sense perceptions, images with contours inconstant and definitions blurry as if seen under water, a cloud and a tree and a car and a cannon and a hand and an eye and a blast of smoke and a sudden eruption of light and the warbling sound of a man singing songs about sex and death and love and the end of the world seventy-five years ago in a noise field of pops and crunching static, and in her consciousness the memories smeared continuously into dreams about fathers slitting the throats of their children on mountaintops thousands of years ago, and somewhere between waking and sleeping she had a vague thought that there is nothing as elemental as an unexplained light in the sky, or the sound of a voice screaming in the dark.
Then she looked to the north, along the distant ridge of mountains and across the rippling, light-dusted plains, and saw a cloud of fire in the sky. She looked, and saw four spirals of fire, blazing bright and revolving clockwise, like whirlpools of flame. The four spirals of fire hovered high in the sky, and they were moving. They darted from one place to another, and there were flashing white tendrils of electricity in the sky. And she looked below them, and saw four enormous gold machines below the four spirals of fire in the sky. The machines went where the fires went, darting rapidly from one place to another. Each of the machines had the appearance of a wheel inside a wheel. The inner wheel of each machine was perpendicular to the outer wheel, and the outer wheel spun clockwise while the inner wheel spun counterclockwise. The wheels were alive with light, and innumerable human eyes studded the rims of the wheels, and all the eyes looked in different directions, and b
linked at different times. Inside each of the four machines was what looked like a living creature. Each of the living creatures had four wings and four faces. The living creatures moved inside the machines, but did not touch the wheels that revolved around them. Wherever the spirals of fire went, the machines went beneath them, and the creatures within went with them. Then everywhere the fields were consumed in fire, and she saw blood running in rivers from the gullies between the mountains. She saw a desert of white ash.
Lana looked around her, and saw that she was standing in a field of tall grass. She looked behind her, and saw the hill: Beyond that was the road. She heard the sound of a truck rumbling down the road and letting off pressure from its gaskets in short, sneezy hisses. To her left she saw the power plant—the squat, ugly building with its two char-black smokestacks. She realized that at some point she must have crossed the railroad tracks, because now she saw that they were behind her. Now the half moon shone big and low above the outline of the mountains. She thought she could see the beginnings of dawn skirting the eastern horizon. Ahead of her, across the field, she saw a row of utility poles, standing along a thin dirt road like a fence of crucifixes, connected by positive parabolas of wire drooping from one to the next. She saw a tall, narrow house at the end of the field where two dirt roads intersected, and there were lights on in a few of its windows. She walked through the field toward the house. The grass thrashed around her. It was still dark when she reached the house. The wooden boards of the front porch felt comfortably flat and hard under her blistered, bare feet. She pushed a button beside the front door and heard the doorbell sound from inside the house. She heard movement inside. After a while, she heard the clunk of a bolt being unlatched, and the door shrieked open on dry hinges.
An old woman peered through the mesh of the screen door at her: She was small and frail, and the texture of the skin of her face looked like crumpled silken paper. She pushed open the screen door and stepped out of the house on tiny white bare feet. The old woman wore a dark blue bathrobe. Her face was the face of someone who has just seen something terrifying, or sublimely beautiful. It was the expression of religious experience. She was breathing heavily and unevenly. Her chest shivered, it seemed her lungs were struggling to draw oxygen. Her hands were shaking.
The Fat Artist and Other Stories Page 9