by Dan Bevacqua
Marcus had filed a complaint. As if he had done something wrong, he’d apologized to his son. He’d talked. He’d talked and talked. But even Marcus’s voice, with all that feeling, with all that feeling they paid him to give, could not give his son’s feeling back to him.
Months later, they were in the kitchen.
“You hit that boy hard,” Marcus said.
When Ty came out from behind the refrigerator door, Marcus looked at him and saw that he was crying. It wasn’t a full-on cry. It wasn’t what he had been doing with his mother, but it was there in his eyes. He had two apples, a plate of honey ham, and a piece of string cheese in his hands.
“Whatever, Dad.”
Ty closed the refrigerator door and began to walk out of the kitchen. Marcus had been sitting on a stool beside the enormous butcher block. He stood up. He’d been trying to say something.
“What did you say?”
“I said, whatever.”
They were both enraged. Marcus felt it. It was a frightened thing between them. He stepped in front of his son.
“Who are you talkin’ to like that?” It felt as if his mouth was all teeth. He was still from Philly. That was him.
“You.” Ty took a step left to go around. Before Marcus realized what he was doing, he had reached up and grabbed his son’s shirt. He wasn’t holding it tight, he was only trying to keep him close, but then Ty pulled, and Marcus tightened and pulled, and then they both pulled hard, and all at once the fabric of the T-shirt ripped along the neckline and then down the front—zip—both of them leaning the way they wanted to go. Marcus had only wanted things to be calm, quiet, to have them sit down together and talk, or so he believed, but then suddenly he was thumping into the butcher block with the entirety of the white T-shirt hanging limp in his hands. Ty staggered back, naked now from the waist up in the kitchen. They stood there, breathing hard, and looked at each other. The plate of ham had fallen to the floor. Ty ran out. Alice ran in.
“What happened in here?” she’d asked him.
“Nothing,” Marcus had said.
At Molly’s, he walked around the pool to the edge of the yard. He was in darkness. He stood between a Japanese elm and some faintly sweet japonica. The realtor had left all the shades open. He watched Luke get halfway up the stairs, walk back down into the living room, and pull the knife out of the wall. He took it back upstairs with him, walking with his head down. Marcus looked back over his shoulder at the canyon, at the half-hidden bungalows and the larger, illuminated compounds with tennis courts. He saw the houses in the foothills, and then Hollywood, and then downtown and the rest of the greater city: everyone with their lights on because it was night, and that’s what these people, all nineteen million of them, did.
He watched as Luke stepped into her bedroom. Marcus’s phone rang on vibrate and he took it out of his pocket. He admired the illuminated picture of his oldest son. They each said hello.
“Mom made me call.”
“I figured,” Marcus said. “What’s going on over there?”
“Xan and his parents are downstairs,” Ty said. “They say they aren’t pressing charges.”
“Charges?” Marcus asked. He sometimes could not believe the planet he was on. “You talk to him yet? Xan?”
“No.”
“You want to?”
“I don’t know. I’m supposed to go down there. Where are you?”
“Had a meeting,” Marcus said. Then he corrected himself. “I had to meet a guy who knew Molly. I had to give him her keys.”
Luke was standing over her bed. He had the knife in his hand. He bent over and ran his hand over the mattress. Marcus watched his lips move.
“Was he a friend of hers?” Ty asked.
“They grew up together,” Marcus said. “Listen, Ty. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry too.”
“It’s been a bad year.”
“Totally,” Ty said.
“Things’ll get better. Everything’ll be fine.”
“Okay,” Ty said. “You always say that.”
“Always say what?” he asked.
Marcus watched as Luke took the knife and stabbed it into the bed. He did this with care at first, coming down slowly, as if he were a detective interested in reenactment, but then the motion took hold of him.
“What was he like? Her friend?” Ty asked.
“You know,” Marcus said. “A guy.”
“Did he talk about her?”
He watched Luke stab down with all his force. He did this again and again and again. A lamp fell off the bedside table.
“He talked about her. He said a few things.”
“Is he nice?”
Marcus heard the blade crack against the springs of the mattress. Goose down filled the air. A shout came through the windowpane.
“You want the truth?” Marcus asked his son.
“Yeah.”
“No,” Marcus said.
AFTERLIFE
BIOPIC 2015
10
ABIGAIL MERGED ONTO THE 5, which was just like the 405, bumper-to-bumper, and then she took State Highway 14 East, a road she had been on maybe two or three times before in her life. Tom punished her by playing Pearl Jam, a band he loved, and she hated, although mostly for dramatic effect. It was a fun, meaningless thing to argue about. She honestly didn’t care what he listened to. Taking a quick look down, she thumbed out of the navigation on her iPhone and checked the weather. It was ninety degrees outside with thirty percent humidity. She could feel the distance between them and the ocean. They were entering the agricultural zone—its yellow-brown edges. High-tension wires drooped over outpost communities. The spines of the desert flora hackled up in the sand like the arched backs of starving dogs.
“You should have told me,” Tom said.
“I did tell you,” she said. “I told you last night. And I told you months ago that it might happen.”
“I thought you were kidding. I thought it was one of your Abigail jokes.”
“What’s an ‘Abigail joke’?” she asked.
“It’s a joke that’s more fucked-up than funny,” Tom said. “Or something that at first seems like a joke, but in the end it’s not, because it’s horrifying.”
“Is that a thing?” she asked. “Like with our friends?”
“Absolutely. With my family too.”
She looked at him. He had a great head of hair. It was dark and wavy and full. It was 90210 hair—but he was forty-five.
“I can live with that,” she said.
They went over a rise. When the road flattened again they were surrounded on all sides by neat rows of almond trees.
“What is this about?” Tom asked. “Do I need to tell you that you’re crazy? That you remain unhinged? That you’re still the terrible infant? What other compliments can I give you? What else do you need to hear?”
“That I make bad decisions,” Abigail said.
“You do.”
“That I’m selfish.”
“You’re selfish.”
“Tell me I don’t think about anyone but myself.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Tom said. “That’s obviously not the case. You think about her.”
She did. She thought about Molly, and she dreamt about Molly. It happened four or five nights a week. On the nights she didn’t dream about Molly, or when she woke up unable to remember, Abigail missed her. The dreams were unremarkable. They were conversations about nothing. Sometimes they sat in a room. Other times, they walked down a dirt road that Abigail guessed was her idea of a dirt road. It was her stock dirt road. Strange dream shit went down. A bush turned into a giant syringe. Molly became Abigail’s mother. Who else would she become? She never told Tom—it would hurt his feelings—but when Abigail woke up in the morning having remembered these transformations, it was often the best part of her day.
“I want to see him,” Abigail said. “I want to see Vincent. I want to look at him.”
“This doesn�
��t make sense to me,” Tom said. “I think it’s a bad idea.”
“It doesn’t have to make sense to you,” Abigail said. “It doesn’t make sense to me. And it is a bad idea. Of course it’s a bad idea. I’m still gonna do it.”
They pulled into one of those lonely, damned towns straight out of Hud or Badlands. There was no sense in even looking at it. Abigail parked her rented Prius in one of the angled spots.
“I need to use the bathroom,” Tom said. “I’m gonna pee in that McDonald’s.”
She turned her head to see what he was talking about—and there it was: a gleaming McDonald’s in a lot that had probably once been occupied by an older brown McDonald’s recently demolished to make room for the new one. This was definitely the case. The hurricane fence used during construction was still up.
“Can you even get in there?” she asked.
He placed his hand out before him on the spot where the air bag would deploy if necessary. He closed his eyes. Tom was kind. He asked her how she was feeling thirty-five times a day. All the same, there remained in him the usual homicidal rage that had to be acknowledged and contended with in order that he should be able to give and receive love.
“Easy does it,” he said to himself.
Five seconds later, she was alone. In total disregard of climate change, she cranked the AC. The actual engine burned on. The cool manufactured air was dynamite. Everyone was awful in their own way. She reached for her phone because her phone was drugs. Three texts from Davros, who she could not wait to be rid of. Have you left yet? he’d asked. And then, an hour later, How’s it going? Finally, almost now, Call me when you can.
Was it wrong of her to say she would write the Molly Bit bio-pic when she had no intention of ever doing so and found the very idea distasteful? Yes. Was it unprofessional? Most assuredly. Did she have a problem doing this? Apparently not. She considered it a kind of intervention, a way of slowing down what would sooner or later be—the movie version of Molly—inevitable. It also gave her grief a focus. It was a form of revenge. It was a lot of things.
She put him on speaker.
“Davros.”
“The screenwriter!” he said, excited, as always. “I’ve been texting.”
“We’re on our way to the prison.”
“We?”
“Me and my husband.”
“You’re married?”
“As of last week,” Abigail said. “His insurance is incredible. It was too good to pass up.”
Both Film Comment and Variety had announced she was somebody again. Echo Chamber (fifteen years after the first draft had been written—and with an entirely different plot) had done better than anyone could have predicted. Not Spiderman good, not Lord of the Rings good, but the film had turned a profit, and was positively reviewed. It wasn’t just boomers with nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon who’d seen it either. The Brooklyn kids had caught on. It made a strange sense to Abigail. Even if zombies were played out, millennials still had within them the urge and capacity to admire those who had come back from the dead. She’d met Davros and his producing partner, Neal, at a BAM event. They were determined to make a Molly Bit. It wasn’t that Abigail disliked them, only that she found them capable of doing harm. They had money. They were big on ideas.
“We’re so pleased we could make this happen for you,” Davros said.
They’d paid for her airfare, her rental, and her hotel. Neal’s stepfather had a connection in the California state legislature. The warden had taken some time. On the other end of the phone, Davros was silent. He was waiting for a thank you.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You’re entirely welcome.”
He was from Argentina. His mother had been born in Buenos Aires. His father was Russian. He’d never in his whole life had an actual job.
“This visit is important,” Davros said. “You’ll get a sense of Vincent. Who is this guy? He comes out of nowhere. We know nothing about him.”
This wasn’t entirely true. There were court and employment records, long reads, timelines, but, because of Roger Vincent’s silence, the world wanted more.
“Right,” Abigail said.
“We know the end of the movie already,” Davros said. “We know Molly dies. That’s the end. It has to be. You can’t escape the confines of a traditional narrative story arc in a life like Molly Bit’s. The story is built in. It precedes her by about five thousand years.”
“I mean—” Abigail said.
“But if you go back and forth in time so it’s Molly, Roger, Molly, Roger, Molly, then you get what you need.”
“You call him Roger?” she asked. “You use his first name?”
“We’ve been thinking about him a lot lately,” Davros said. “Right now, he’s all we’re thinking about.”
Abigail had a tendency to sympathize too much with others. In its own corrupted way, it was why she was so judgmental. She identified with people to the point where she was embarrassed on their behalf when they made a fool of themselves, or spoke out of turn, or did the wrong thing—whatever that meant. She felt what should have been the other’s anguish as if it were her own and then resented them for it. It was something she was working on. At the same time, this problem of hers as she understood it also provided her with a distinct advantage in life. She knew damn well when someone—Davros, in this case—hadn’t bothered to consider her, or her murdered friend, at all. Even though she was lying to him and had insinuated that it was her exact cup of tea that she meet Vincent so as to fill out his character, Davros had never once asked how she might feel about the encounter. He had never suggested it might be too painful, too much, or, as Tom had put it, a bad idea. More than anything else, this was why she was going to ruin everything and make it so that no one from the industry—at least not for a while—could go back again. She was sick of ideas. She missed a time that never was, when everyone owned up to their broken heart.
“Have you given any thought to our last conversation?” Davros asked.
“A little.”
“Both Neal and I feel it’s important that we see it,” he said. “It’s one of the criteria that we’re demanding from potential directors. Their interpretation of it will be their own, of course, and it must be executed with care. But the death scene is essential. We need to see him stab her.”
* * *
The McDonald’s was in fact open. There was no PlayPlace. Tom was in a silver booth designed for someone with a giant caboose. One look at him and she knew his back hurt.
“Do you want some Aleve?” she asked him.
“No,” he said. “I just need to stretch.”
She took the seat across from him. He got up and started doing his weird, subtle hip thrusts.
“That’s it, baby,” Abigail said. “Nice and slow.”
“Stop.”
“Don’t be mad.”
“I’m not mad,” Tom said, wincing. “I’ve been in here, sipping the hottest coffee known to God, going over everything.”
“I should have told you sooner,” she said.
He sat down again and rubbed the back of her hand three times with his thumb.
“My mom had a friend who was murdered,” he said. “In college. I’d forgotten all about it.”
“So did my mother,” she said. “She was older.”
“It was the boyfriend.”
“Same deal.”
“Then he killed himself.”
“Uh-huh,” Abigail said.
“They buried them side-by-side in a cupid grave,” Tom said. “They thought someone else had broken in and killed them both. It took a year for the police to put it together.”
“Then what did they do?” she asked him.
“They dug her the hell out.”
* * *
It was another hour and twenty minutes before they saw the prison. From the road, there was no possible way to comprehend how enormous it was. Abigail knew its actual size because of a Google image search. Sh
e’d put her finger on her computer the night before and counted twenty large buildings in what looked to be an octagon that had at some point broken apart into a more chaotic shape. These were the lock-ups. They were grayish-black. Small yellow buildings were scattered across the outer expanse. Wide paths connected everything. A giant fence was a giant fence was a giant fence.
But that was on the computer. Real life was different. If they had been two other people, they would have been quiet, but they weren’t two other people. They were them.
“Turn this garbage off,” she said.
“Roll your window down,” Tom said.
“I’m rolling,” Abigail said. “What do you call this?”
The entrance post wasn’t special. It was old school, or simply old. The white paint, the linoleum, the shingles on the roof: everything was peeling. There was a man inside with an assault rifle.
“Identification,” he said.
Abigail could only see the correction officer’s chest and nothing of his face. He didn’t bend down to make the experience any easier for her. She was forced to lean out the window and look up at him. He had the round German head of someone she’d gone to high school with and couldn’t remember the name of. The Ray-Bans on top of his skull looked like a tiara. He had pretty blue eyes and a sunburn.
“That’s me,” she said, handing over their IDs. “And that’s him.” She felt Tom do a little hunch-and-wave move behind her.
“Hold on,” the officer said.
Outside the Prius, the sun was murder. California was a bad idea. White people shouldn’t live out in the desert. They got heatstroke. Its vastness mocked the tidy confines of their tragedies.