In the light there was shadow and movement. The rose finches had clustered in the windows of the walls; their forms cut shapes out of the light. One shot down into the garden, its shadow contracting to nothing as the bird lighted on the very spot it had been thrown onto among the flowers and vines.
“Anyway, yes, I suppose the domestic situation is fraught enough,” Kames said, no longer as ruminative and more conciliatory. “That makes this piece no worse a place to start, to understand how one layer of complication grafts onto another. But it’s still very thick with exegesis. Perhaps we can backload some of that, even move it to a later talk, and you can build a bit on the relations between the various political bodies?”
“I’ll see if I can find the right materials, from the journals, to interpolate. They might not exist. I’d rather not do it through exposition. But if the material is there, sure.”
“Yes, I can see you are set on that. I think we’ll give it a go, without a real frame then.”
The cold had seeped through their clothes. They rose at the same time, facing away from each other. “Even historians need performance art,” Kames said. “That must be your feeling.”
25
Blue tits, a half-dozen of them, just below the window, hopping about on a branch in crisp Valley light filling the thinnest sky, translucent blue and shading off quickly at its upper edge toward a moon still sharp and clear and of a phosphorescent gray bespeaking death and life both.
Jen loved California for this light, and it was the memory of it, from her first trip out West, that clinched it for her. She was only three weeks removed now from her life back East, in the old apartment, under that ambivalent light that barely lit the place, or Halsley itself, it seemed like.
Whatever she thought of the light, though, she would have had to move—or be moved, forcibly. She’d learned from other actresses she’d met that the adult industry was really a possession of the West. On the East Coast, there wasn’t enough work for them, and the scenes didn’t pay as much as they should have. Since that first shoot with the smoothie, she’d done a few softcore videos, ones where she’d only been called upon to kiss girls or self-penetrate. But the pay was modest and couldn’t offset the rent and the booze (and the pills). She was also finding out it was sheer fantasy to think you could make real money in the business merely fucking yourself. A guy had to give it to you for that to happen.
At that point, she wasn’t quite broke yet, but on the cusp of eviction anyway. The landlord wanted her out, her neighbors too, though she’d been so out of it, she could only partly recall the episodes that explained why. Had she managed to apologize to them, for any of it, or had she only dreamed that she had in drugged slumbers? Either way, they didn’t want to hear it.
Carl had called a few times in those weeks. Early on, she picked up, choosing occasions when she was pleasantly buzzed rather than wasted to do so. She dodged his questions about her new job and steered their conversations toward a common love, books, especially the ancient ones. In the fourth and last of the calls, they talked about ancient history—Herodotus—for at least twenty minutes. It confirmed what she’d suspected, that he was marvelously well read in just the things she found most captivating.
She stopped picking up after that. She didn’t care, or want to care, about what was happening with the case, with the one assaulting the whores. Talking to Carl made that harder. She didn’t care to know about the other girls either, even Mariela. Nothing that really mattered bound them together. She wasn’t interested in false connections. The only person she’d actually talked to with any fondness or frequency in Halsley lately was the Palestinian running the corner liquor store. She thought he had a good heart.
And then there was Carl, of course. That only gave her another reason not to answer. She didn’t want to tell him about the drinking or have to lie to him about it either. But he kept circling back to it. When they’d spoken last, he’d asked about her drinking with a kind of curious concern that seemed to reach beyond his job. He didn’t ask about anything else that way, not books, not even the case itself. It felt personal, and she was glad he asked but gladder not to answer. It wasn’t his problem that booze had overcome her since her brother moved out, or that her parents refused to send any more money. (Was that Reed’s doing? She hated to think so but felt it must be true.)
She also knew from their conversations, from what she’d said about the ancients, about pictures and profiles, the past and the future, that she’d won some bit of respect from Carl, this transparently educated man slumming it as an agent. She didn’t want to give any of it back. She liked the gentle arrogance of his manner, actually, and the way she could put it under pressure from angles he didn’t expect.
At that moment, though, she was in no position to do that. Things were too hard, that’s why she’d moved out so suddenly. Maybe she would call him when she could stand, or else when she could barely crawl, things had gotten so bad. Not now.
Instead she focused on the light she lacked, that all of the East did, Bethesda too. Four days later, after her usual taper from vodka down to wine, she gave up the apartment—she wasn’t leaving much behind, really—and for the second time in three years landed on a college friend’s couch in Los Angeles. Jen had been a lot less scattered that first time, she knew this from the way her friend carefully observed her now.
Staying there kept Jen from returning to liquor, though, and in any case it took her only a little over a week to find a new home, in the San Fernando Valley, on a tip from a porn actress whose tits she’d sucked for a pittance back in Halsley. A group of girls all shared a huge house with a talent agent, Frank C., who was influential enough to guarantee a steady stream of work for them.
For the moment, Jen had the room to herself; another girl had left that week, for unexplained reasons. The other bed, also a queen, rested against the far wall and was made up primly in a bright red quilt with thick pillows in yellow cases resting on top of it. She hoped the bed would stay just that way, empty and pretty, at least for a while, until she settled in. Everything was gorgeous.
“Jen!” came the muffled yell from a man three floors down.
“Okay,” she replied, in a voice she knew would not carry back to him. She was still in her underwear. In the third drawer of the dresser, nestled in a bed of socks and pajama bottoms, she found the only things she was careful to bring with her from Halsley: a row of plastic orange bottles, some of which had sat unopened for weeks during the last vodka binge. She took two pills from the leftmost; one pill from the second; skipped two bottles, irrelevant for the moment; took one from the next; skipped another—relevant, but too strong for the early afternoon—and tapped out two more tiny ones from the rightmost. She’d drunk nothing stronger than wine the past two weeks and the meds were a part of that story, though they did cloud her mind in a different way.
“Jen!”
“Okay,” she replied with more urgency but no more volume. She pulled two hangers down off the garment rack next to the bed: very fine white fishnets that she sheathed her legs with, and a stretch dress that clamped around her, making a bra mostly unnecessary.
Through the hole left in the rack by the clothes she’d taken down, she looked into a mirror. It threw back only a generic California tart. She’d seen girls like this in Venice Beach at dusk, just after landing at LAX. Later, as she got acquainted with her new state, she would find other species of the genus in Malibu and Newport and Laguna.
Her face was already painted, pink dashes along the cheekbones fading to a feathery white further down, near the jaw. She tied her hair back in a ponytail. Her eyebrows were carefully shaped, black, narrow, and short, and the lashes around her eyes were conspicuously false. The chests of many of the girls in the house were as well, though her own, so far, was not. It was generous, given her size. She was a wispy one, uncommonly small-made. They’d had to size down the stockings.
Before the man could fire off her name again she stepped into the h
all, shoeless. Downstairs they’d have all sorts of heels and boots.
“Honey, come down now,” he said. “We need to see how we want this to work.”
“Okay,” she said. Finally her voice was loud enough, and traveling through few enough barriers, to reach him, Frank.
From another door a blonde emerged, short, small breasted, and holding a pair of blue pumps by the heels.
“Jeff’s putting me in this scene too!” Amanda said. “Just more fun. Frank tell you about it?”
Jen bobbed her head vaguely. Amanda took her arm and trotted down the spiral staircase with her in tow. Her hand slipped from Jen’s biceps to her forearm to her hand as the distance between them grew. She stopped and waited for Jen to catch up. “What else are you listing, besides boy-girl? Three-way? You want to work your way up, though, to the crazier stuff. Double-vag, things like that. That’s what Liz and Annie tell me anyway. It keeps directors coming back. Once you’ve given it all away, it’s harder getting hired. So you want to stretch it out, like a strip tease.”
Jeff, the director, had four small DV cameras set up in the vast cube of a living room. It opened onto a patio of a nameless shape and a pool so large the Olympics immediately came to Jen’s mind. No one was outside past the glass, just that crisp, directionless light hanging above the shallow hills the pool melted into. Their hardy greens and browns were flat and even and without shimmer.
There were several flat-roofed mansions in pastel pink, and one in stark maritime blue, probably looking much like the one she was looking out from, she guessed, though she’d never observed one of them like this, from a distance, from inside another. How long she would stay here she couldn’t say, but it looked like a perfect beginning.
Frank met them at the base of the stairs, shoeless like her, but in Nantucket shorts. Thin white frames with rhomboid lenses sat on his pulpy nose, and his orange-toned skin looked thick and chafed. “So, these girls are new,” he said, looking at them but talking to Jeff, who was squatting in the middle of the living room, fingertips spread wide for balance, examining the angles. The furniture was modular: segments of white leather, some backed, some not, that could be freely reconfigured.
“One’s newish, one is really new, right?” Frank said. Amanda frowned in mock objection and squeaked past him toward the cameras with a peck on his cheek.
Jen stopped on the last step, leaving her level with Frank, who clasped the back of her head with one hand. His fingers ran above and below her ponytailed hair, the way one would hold a cigar. “You’ll like Amanda,” he said. “Doesn’t matter if you’ve been with a girl before or haven’t even thought about it. She’s that sweet. And your check’ll be that much bigger.” He slid his hand down her neck to her shoulder and rubbed it. “This is the easiest sort of shoot because we just do it in the house itself. It’s kind of a famous set now, this house. Shoots beautifully.”
“We’ll start outside by the pool and bring things in,” Jeff said as he made his way over to them. “Oh, I like this,” he said, gesturing at Jen. “The tiny ones. I’m Jeff.”
“Lisa,” Jen offered. She may have crossed a continent, but she was still the same working girl.
■■■
A round of Ativan set the mood. They laid Lisa out over one of the segments, with Amanda’s cunt just inches from her face. This was new. Lisa hadn’t truly been with a woman—kissing, fondling, didn’t count—and the fragrance startled her. She knew it only on a man’s breath, or from his cock. But then it was adulterated with saliva or pre-come, and often booze. She had of course caught a whiff of it on her hand, after she’d masturbated, though again, that was not the smell of cunt itself but of its secretions on a foreign body. When they were still tucked within the organ itself, she knew now something else was produced, a complex of sweat and skin, mucus and piss, all distilled and decocted in the airless space between the legs. Amanda’s legs. There must be something common, though, she thought, to this musk and all others of womankind. At least a family resemblance.
Amanda slid down and Lisa’s nose ran up to her clit. Their lips met in a cross. “Take it in,” said the stunt-cock, as the girls had a habit of calling his kind. He grabbed her ponytail and thrust her nose down into the cunt.
“Just stick out your tongue,” Amanda said. Lisa’s tongue came out. Amanda took the ponytail from the stunt-cock and steered Lisa’s head, and with it her tongue, into her. The taste was also a complex, and it seemed to Lisa utterly uninferable from the smell. She didn’t mind either of them, really.
He buried his cock in Lisa. Few if any johns had a cock like this, none she could recall, and this was with the benefit of muscle relaxants. While he fucked Lisa from behind the stunt-cock thumbed her asshole open. After some work he got three fingers in. He pulled them out, spit on the asshole, evacuated the cunt, and filled her asshole in a single thrust that, for all the Soma, drew a sharp yelp from Lisa, though Amanda’s crotch muffled it somewhat. The two of them pinned Lisa’s face there until she felt less from both orifices. The sense of taste seemed to disappear from her mouth, the touch from her asshole, except when he would pull out to make it gape for the cameras, which she would later find out it did. Frank said she was a gaper.
First there would be the ache of decompression. On reentry she would be struck by a pain like a paper-cut made by thick stock, the unsealed envelope from a luxury stationary set maybe. The cock would rub the cut crossways as it entered, until the head was past the fissure. Then only the smooth base of the cock would worry it, a background irritation she soon forgot.
“You want to clean this up, sweetheart?” the stunt-cock said to Amanda. She let go of the ponytail and took the pressure away from Lisa’s face, one of two pressures she’d been feeling. The second disappeared as he pulled out of her.
Amanda stuck her tongue into Lisa’s gape first. This felt like nothing to Lisa, not just because of the Soma, but because of the size of the gape the stunt-cock had created. He pulled Amanda away by the hair, replacing the tongue with his cock. Then he slipped the cock down Amanda’s throat until sputum came up.
“You taste so good,” Amanda said to her. Lisa didn’t know what to say. So she said nothing as she lay there, the leather ottoman holding her up, the stunt-cock going back and forth between her gape and Amanda’s mouth.
There would be no ass to mouth for Lisa, though. Frank didn’t want to spook her. She’d only been in the house a couple of weeks and this was her first taste of hardcore.
The stunt-cock pulled out and brought Lisa around with her ponytail to where Amanda was. She wobbled and tripped to the ground; the Soma was turning her to jelly.
Flanked by the girls, their faces on either side of his cock, he stroked himself off. Lisa could smell her own bowels on his cock. They were familiar to her from the smoothie shoot back East. He kept jerking while the girls waited. Amanda squeezed her tits together and gargled his balls sympathetically for a while to encourage him. But he was tiring. He switched hands and his strokes got jerkier. Amanda was starting to look as if she felt sorry for him. Lisa was having trouble simply staying on her knees; the pills wanted her to lie down.
Eventually his face began to bob with belief. All three of them brightened. In an impromptu maneuver, he got to Lisa’s side and burst across both their faces. The two girls separated their cheeks and long strings of come fell on their thighs. Come hung from Lisa’s chin. Amanda clipped it off with her lips. A beat went by that felt like a call for reciprocation. Lisa slurped the come off of Amanda’s gummed eyelids. The blonde giggled and pecked Lisa on the lips with guts on her breath.
26
Like a tambourine continuously shaken, going on twenty minutes now. This, the sound of crashing keys. They bristled from the ring in copy-proof cuts, circular, tubular, square. The brassy rattle of the keys against the dashboard had been almost pleasant at first, softening the rumble of the ancient jeep’s engine. It distracted Ravan from another rattling, of his body, as they drove over the mud sauce
rs of the flats of Death Valley, the common origin. Now he’d reached a second phase. Rather than diverting him, the jangle melded with the jarring of his viscera, encouraging the sickness.
“Why so many?” Ravan said with his palms flat on the scarred dash, eyeing the keys.
“Lots of doors in the national labs,” Menar said.
“No, but why did you bring them all over with you from India?”
“I didn’t think not to, really.”
“Well, you could separate the key for the ignition.”
“But then this lovely music would go,” Menar said, gesturing at the keys. “Wouldn’t you mind?” The suggestion of a smile breached his face. Only a relative could see this.
“No.”
“Okay, I will do when we get there. Ten minutes. The way back will be a whisper if you like—except for this yappy engine, of course. I just hope we’ll get to play baccarat before I leave. I’ve never been to Vegas, you know.”
The station appeared ahead, a C-shaped aluminum tube with entries on both ends of it and a broad pair of doors in the recessed middle, raised up like a garage. Everywhere the ground was paved in hexagonal mud scales, a chemical signature of the valley soil that produced this kinetic signature in passing vehicles.
Ravan looked in the rearview mirror and saw nothing but dust.
“Your NOAA people tell me these stones—see that one?—they leave trails. Only no one has ever seen or recorded them move. That can’t be right.”
“I really don’t know.”
“Sailing stones.”
“Yes.”
“They also mentioned an unplayable golf course somewhere in the valley.”
“Did you bring your clubs then. For the challenge.”
“What people you work for, Ravan.”
“With.”
Square Wave Page 28