by Reiss, CD
“My virtuous reputation will remain intact.”
“You’re not getting it,” he said. “No one cares if you sleep around. It’s your professional reputation, your ability to deliver that matters. It’s the industry you have to appease.”
“I have a message for the industry.” I hung up.
I left the equipment. I wanted to be unencumbered.
46
laine
I watched one YouTube video over and over. Michael Greydon, America’s Boyfriend, pulls his Alfa Romeo out of his driveway and gets out. Seven paps jump on him. He doesn’t smile. He lets the gate close. He swaggers a little. Sunglasses. Leather jacket. Jeans. He has a spray can in his hand, and he steps up to his gate. He assesses the size of it. The paps ask him what he’s doing while they shoot him. They ask where his driver is. He doesn’t answer. He raises his arm and, with turquoise spray paint, puts a long vertical line on the leftmost side of the gate. Then a shorter horizontal one. He doesn’t stop, and the paps get silent as he paints his gate with two words.
FUCK YOU
I was proud of him. I watched that video a million times. I didn’t know who he was flipping off, and I didn’t care. The paparazzi, his staff, Brad, Britt, his father, his mother…me.
Probably not me, but I was pleased for him. He’d cancelled everything and split like a man who owned his own life.
What was keeping me from doing the same? I talked a good game about being my own woman, but I was shackled to my past. I dragged it around like a dead weight, looking forward as if ignoring what had happened would free me.
Not what I did.
What had happened.
Not what I allowed.
What had been done to me.
At the bottom of my drawer, I found the card Michael had given me. Just a name and a number embossed on fine, cream linen.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I dialed.
* * *
“I’m not taking any new clients.” The lawyer leaned back in her chair when I finished the story. Her sage linen pantsuit brought out the red in her hair. “But I have some experiences that make me, shall we say, sympathetic to your story.”
“Okay.” I sat on the other side of her desk, kneading a tissue into dust.
“Barnett’s getting the pictures taken down. The state’s prosecuting. He doesn’t have a paycheck to garnish or a reputation to protect. So a civil suit’s a waste of time.”
“So there’s nothing for you to do?” I was going to start crying all over again.
“I can guide a killer emotional impact statement and act as a victim liaison with the prosecutor. That makes his job easier, so he’ll listen to my recommendations. What I need to know, before I say another word, is your goal here.”
“Um, I want… I want to deal with this.”
“No.” She leaned forward with her elbows on the desk. “I’m not your psychiatrist. I’m the difference between Jake Allens going to jail and Jake the Pillow Snake being utterly and completely destroyed.”
“That one,” I said, sitting up straight for the first time. “Destroyed.”
“That means you’re looking this in the face, and again, that’s not always easy.”
“Utterly and completely, Ms. Drazen.” I held up a fist. “Destroy him.”
“Atta girl.”
47
LAINE
Michael traveled the globe as if he was the happiest, most grateful little bird ever, jaunting off to faraway places and filming everything. From the sky over Tunis, the waters of the Nile, and the sheer cliffs of Tibet, he posted it all on the internet. Everyone followed him and his journeys as an anonymous traveler. Especially me. I’d gone from his secret crush, to his nightmare, to his lover, to his problem. In the end, I’d wound up a fan, not of his acting or his stardom but of the man he was.
“You keep saying you don’t care about him, but if you ask me, the lady doth protest too much,” Phoebe said, staring at my computer. We’d taken some test shots for the wedding, and she was noodling through the unedited batch.
“I don’t even know what that means.” I wiped the inside of a pot.
“I’m being bitchy. I’m sorry. Never mind. It’s just that I’m sitting here looking at your computer,” Phoebe continued, “and you have, like, ten files with his name on them and his YouTube tabs open.”
I slammed down the pot. “So?”
“Can you call him?”
I put the pot away. “No.” I walked around the desk and discovered Phoebe wasn’t looking at the folder with her wedding test shots.
“I clicked by accident,” she said.
She looked meek, but I knew her too well. A YouTube window with the sky flying across it was open. The shooter was behind a little camera mounted on his shoulder, invisible to the viewer.
Michael’s skydive. The parachute opened with a whoosh, and his velocity to the ground was cut to a drift.
“It’s fine,” I said, pausing the video. “I shouldn’t keep that stuff on my desktop when Miss Sneaky Boots is around.”
When the video window disappeared, the pictures from the loft upstairs, when Michael had made me eggs, came up. He came through the frame, same as always, with a half smile so intense it burned through the lens.
“These are really nice. You should sell them,” she said.
“I can’t. It would be weird.”
“Is this why you haven’t been doing what you used to? The paparazzi thing? Because of him?”
“No,” I said in a way that was too definite for what I felt. “It’s just… it just lost its allure, I guess. The excitement is gone, and I have this yucky feeling.”
“From taking pictures?”
“No, from stealing. As if they were never mine to sell in the first place. But these?” I pointed at the ones of Michael that Phoebe had pulled up. “These feel good. Bad, because it’s him, but good, because they’re mine. And I can’t sell them, because talk about yucky.” I waved it away. I didn’t want to talk about Michael anymore. “The whole thing. Just because someone wants to buy something doesn’t mean I need to degrade myself to produce it. I mean, yes, there will always be paps, and there will always be celebrities, and in a way, they do ask for it because they’re smart people, and they know what’s involved with success. And the magazines ask for it because millions of people ask for it. And the money goes around and around. It’s a snake eating its tail then complaining it’s choking.” I paced away from the computer and fussed in the kitchen. “Everyone’s degraded because we’re treating people like objects, like marks. The stars. The magazines. The readers. And me. I was degraded. Just because I did it to myself doesn’t make it less degrading.”
“What does that mean for you exactly?”
“I have no idea. But…” I took a deep breath. “Can you read the thing I wrote for my lawyer? The impact statement?”
“You sure?”
I hadn’t let anyone but my lawyer look at it, but there was something wrong with exposing my barest soul to a judge and Jake himself without showing Phoebe first.
I leaned over her and clicked open the document. “I’m sure.”
* * *
CRIMINAL COURT OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA
THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN SEALED BY THE COURT
My name is Laine Cartwright. That’s my biological father’s last name, but I don’t remember him. I’ve been a foster child in more homes than I can count. Some good. Some bad. Most in the middle. The impression that upbringing left on me was that I was either invisible or a burden. Mostly, I knew from a very young age that I was alone. No one was going to help me. No one.
I’m twenty-five years old now, and the first time Jake Allens raped me, I was fifteen.
He was twenty-one.
I’ve been telling myself—all these years—that I consented.
When I came to him, upset and vulnerable, and he put my hand up my shirt as if he had the right to, I said nothing, because he’d been grooming me for that
moment for a long time.
When he took my virginity, I was already crying, so I said nothing.
I asked him to stop when he was hurting me, and he pretended he didn’t hear me. Then he said he was almost finished, so I should just be a big girl and take it.
And when I told him I didn’t want to do that anymore, he promised a level of stability I’d never had and the only affection I thought I deserved. So I let him do it again, and even now I’m saying “I let him” as if I had control. I didn’t.
That time with him and his friends—including co-defendant Enid Footman—is burned in my memory as a time when I belonged. I had a sort of family who’d never leave me, who’d defend me and feed me. Who called me one of them not because the government placed me in their care, but because they’d chosen me.
They passed me around like a piece of trash. They regularly abused me in ways so degrading, I spent years not thinking about it so I wouldn’t just curl up into a ball.
I’d like to remind the court that I was fifteen, and Jake, who had been my foster brother and was well aware of my age, was in charge of what these men did to me. They were all of age. Some were in their forties and had daughters of their own.
I’m sorry I didn’t say anything, but even now, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I might not have done it, except for Jake putting my pictures on the internet, which reopened wounds I thought I’d healed. My private humiliation is now public.
I’ve told myself I consented because admitting I didn’t have control makes me feel as if I could lose it again at any moment. But I didn’t. What he and Enid did has made relationships nearly impossible for me. I mix up love with anger and helplessness all the time. I’m so terrified of being abandoned and forgotten that I want to be abandoned and forgotten so that at least I’ll say I knew it. Loving someone is pure terror, and being loved is worse because I don’t want to hurt anyone the way I was hurt.
I’m one of the lucky ones. I have a career I love and friends who are more family than any I’d ever hoped for. But this hasn’t gone away for a minute. I am permanently impacted. Jake, Enid, and their gang committed murder. They killed a part of me. They took a healthy life that would have been hard to live already and made it completely impossible once when I was a teenager, and again when they tried to blackmail me with my memories. Twice, they destroyed any chance I had at being right with myself.
I humbly ask the court to please consider these factors when calculating sentencing.
Subscribed and sworn,
Laine Cartwright
48
michael
I got profoundly lonely and profoundly bored, but those weren’t the times I thought of Laine the most. I thought of her when my feet hurt from walking all day. I thought of her when I saw a sunrise worth photographing. I thought of her when I sat in a cafe and no one noticed me as anything but a white American. When I wanted to share a moment, I wanted her there, so I photographed those moments and filmed them. It was a shallow cure for a pervasive disease. Loneliness. It was at once empowering and debilitating.
I thought she might see them, and I felt less alone. That connection created with a shared photograph—was that what she had been doing with her work? Creating connections between people? From my perch at the top of the media food chain, I couldn’t see it. Maybe my face had created a connection between people, given them something in common. Maybe she hadn’t been a parasite but a facilitator.
I wanted to talk to her about all of it, to get her take on those connections, but I was far away, and she’d left me. So I went about my days doing things I’d had to think about. Speaking with my hands. Getting a roof over my head. Surviving. I didn’t need approval to do any of that, so despite being alone, I felt like a free man.
I hadn’t thought about certain things in what seemed like forever. How to be in a public space. How much eye contact to make. Calling ahead so all the right people and none of the wrong people would know where I was.
By the time I got to Fez, I’d gotten normalcy down to a science. A few weeks past Christmas, I sat in a shop, drinking mint tea and reading a little Kurt Vonnegut book I’d found outside a hostel. Breakfast of Champions. The main guy, Dwayne Hoover, figured he’s the only person in the world with free will, and everyone else was a machine.
His perspective was psychopathic, but I smiled as I read it because I was so grateful to be in that little tea shop with a moment to read a beat-up book I’d found in a cardboard box.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it. In the dark of a room built fifty years before, with cracked plaster and a window with no glass, remembering being seen by people I’d never see, feeling as if the world revolved around me and made me responsible for it. My free will had been broken, but was it still?
If I could do whatever I wanted, what would it be?
The mosque’s morning prayers started soon after four in the morning.
Once the nightly chanting blasting through a loudspeaker stopped creeping me out, it annoyed me—until that night. It made me feel connected to the rest of the city. The country. The world.
And, of course, Laine.
I was going back to my home, and to my girl.
49
LAINE
The postcard from Morocco was so incongruous, I almost threw it away with the junk.
Dear Laine,
I miss you.
Always,
Michael
Under his name, he’d written a short web link.
What the hell?
I went to my computer and typed it in, letting my finger hover over the ENTER key.
If I looked at whatever this was, would he know?
I hit Enter anyway.
The web opened to a private video. I clicked on the big white triangle in the center and it started from the beginning.
I gasped when I saw his face. He hadn’t shaved and his hair was a wreck, but he was beautiful. He leaned back in a bed. The plaster wall behind him was cracked and a man’s voice, chanting in a language I didn’t know, was broadcast over loudspeakers outside.
“Laine,” he said. “You came.”
My hand covered my mouth.
“Thank you. I couldn’t sleep, then the evening prayers started.” He waved in the direction of the window. “So I gave up trying to sleep, and I was just listening in the dark. When I first heard this, I thought, damn, this is creepy, but now… I don’t know. It’s uplifting. That was such a wow moment. I wanted to share it. But not with everyone. Just you. Just Laine. So here I am.”
He paused. My hand was still over my mouth.
“I want to ask how you are,” he continued, “but I won’t hear the answer. So. How are you?”
In the space he left me, I told the truth. “I miss you.”
“I hope you said you miss me,” he said. “But you probably said you were fine.”
“I’m not.”
“You wouldn’t want to worry me. I know you’re scared of hurting people because you were hurt. I get it. I get you had to leave so you could live with what was happening. Not to you. To me. And Laine? That’s…” He shook his head. “Was that supposed to make me not love you? Because if it was, it backfired. Blew right up.”
The chanting stopped.
We were alone. I wanted to crawl into the screen, curl into his arms, and hold him until he fell asleep.
“I didn’t know what I was doing when I left. But I thought… ‘Ah! She thought she was going to ruin me, but I ruined myself.’”
He ran his fingers through his hair. I touched the screen but felt only glass.
“I’m ready to come home. If I do, am I coming home to you? I just need to know what to expect. If you can… there’s a comment thing under here. This is a private video. So can you just say something? Call me? Tell the agent who fired me? I don’t care. Whatever you want.”
He shrugged as if what I wanted mattered a great deal, but he didn’t want to pressure me.
“I’m going to
try to sleep. So. Good night, Laine.”
His image froze and the white triangle came back, daring me to watch him ask me what I wanted again, and daring me to comment on a question with no answer.
* * *
I went out that night, same as always, stalking the streets in my sneakers. I took hundreds of frames of I-didn’t-even-know-what, waiting for something good and worthy to appear. Sometimes I climbed a fence because I was curious or got on an empty eighteen-wheeler docked at a warehouse to get to the roof just to see what was there. The corners of downtown embraced me, but they revealed nothing. Not yet. But if they showed me anything at all, I’d be there to see it. That was the important thing. Showing up.
I found an alley I hadn’t seen since I was ten. It was the little strip behind Mister Yi’s sweater factory. I remembered the patterns in the bricks and the slope of the cobblestones into the iron drain. The paint on the exit sign was worn out and lit by a new, up-to-code exit sign. I took a picture of them together, the old and the new, because I could, but I knew it wasn’t special.
A grey metal door slapped open, and the sound of thumping techno poured out. Two, three, five people burst out, laughing and screaming. I gasped in surprise.
“Shit!” a girl in a boob-exposing top said.
“What?” a guy in sunglasses shouted.
Brad Sinclair laughed. “Aw, man! You are so damn good.”
“No fucking paparazzi!” Sunglasses Guy said.
Two girls stepped back and hovered over a flame and something small between them.
“I’m not—”
“Get over here!” Brad said and enfolded me in a hug.