King of Joy

by Richard Chiem

  Forever?

  Perry says, Yeah, it’s pretty weird.

  Perry pushes the red button to open the garage door. The ceiling motor grinds, the garage door folds and opens, and Corvus imagines gears turning. As the garage door pulls open, she sees the boy and the two huge men from last night’s party standing at the very end of the small paved driveway. They look as though they have been standing there all morning: the two brute men look immovable, and the boy looks like he’s freezing to death, shivering as he stands there.

  Perry looks stunned, his face is white. He says, What?

  Corvus tugs at her shirt as though to hide her chest, and walks quickly over to the standing red tool chest, pulling out a large hammer. She spins the hammer in her hand once. The two men walk the boy up the paved driveway.

  I’m sorry to disturb you, Perry, says one of the tall men. He looks at Corvus and says, Corvus. But this boy has something to say. The other tall man nods.

  Corvus lowers the hammer to her side and asks, How did you know my name?

  The boy from the party tries to talk but no sound comes out of his mouth. He has a black eye, dirt on his shirt, and looks pale. Finally, he says, I’m really, really sorry, Perry. I shouldn’t have been so disrespectful last night. I’m really sorry, Perry. The boy walks a little closer. I’m sorry, Corvus.

  The boy is too ashamed to look Corvus in the eye, still shivering, although it isn’t cold outside.

  Corvus spins the hammer in her hand again. Perry says, Okay, okay. Look, we have to go. I have to drive my fiancée to work right now.

  Both tall men nod and begin to leave. They tap the boy on the shoulder but he stays standing there, disheveled and sorry. Perry opens the passenger door for Corvus and turns to look back at the boy.

  The front door opens, and Michelle appears in her bra and underwear, looking as though she just doesn’t care, smoking a joint, to check the mail. She’s wearing black slides and she slides down the driveway. The two tall men walk off in rhythm, and Corvus and Perry blow Michelle a kiss and wave goodbye. They drive off with their windows rolled down, bumping the bass loudly on the trunk stereo.

  Michelle, bills and advertisements in her hand, walks over to the boy still standing in the driveway. In the sunlight, she considers him and sees he has a tattoo on his neck that reads tattoo.

  Exhaling smoke, she asks, Is your mother’s name Tattoo?

  He shakes his head, No.

  Then that’s fucking stupid. Get off the premises before I call the pigs.

  Corvus watches her co-worker eat a ripe banana and forgets what she was doing in the first place. Mary with her stoned eyes and unbuttoned uniform says, I was legally dead for a full minute once. She talks with her mouth full of chewed Skittles and banana. The lobby is empty, air-conditioned, and sun-drenched, the light pouring in from the glass walls. The rusted kettle pops bright yellow kernels and the smell of butter in the air haunts them for the entire shift. No one wants to watch a movie today—this has been the case lately. No shows for five screens.

  Corvus says, I know, you’ve told me before. Lake Erie, right?

  No, Mary says, smiling. Lake Crescent. Lake Erie was another story. Mary slips a twenty-dollar bill from the cash register into her pocket, eyes the surveillance camera, then moves to the kettle, scooping and mixing the popcorn together. White and yellow, butter and plain.

  Mary says, Only six more hours.

  Louis walks over holding a broom and dustpan.

  He asks, Do you feel that?

  Corvus asks, Feel what?

  Louis has been showing signs of affection for Corvus for weeks now. Plus, he’s a talker. He likes being a talker. He winks at her, gets a little too close, and Corvus looks openly disgusted. His uniform smells like cigarette smoke and old butter, his white shirt no longer white.

  No, I don’t feel anything, Corvus says. Perhaps nausea. Yeah, nausea.

  I hope you feel better, Louis says.

  Corvus walks backward toward the stairs to escape to the projection room. Walking up the flight of stairs, she lifts her eyes to the skylight and imagines flying all the way through to the sky and clouds like a superhero. She can overhear Mary saying, What the fuck is wrong with you? You know it’s obvious what you’re doing, right? You know she’s engaged, right?

  Inside the employees’ lounge, the size of a closet, Corvus pulls her hair back and takes a codeine pill and slips off her dress. Looking at herself in the spotted mirror, she locks the door and takes off her underwear. Corvus whispers, I’m naked inside a movie theater. She unzips her bag, pulling out her shirt and tie. There is something helpless in putting on a uniform, she thinks, in reading your name on a pin next to a corporate logo.

  Fully dressed to company code, she walks with a lint roller to the projection booth. No one is there, and all the shows are underway. Some of the other employees get scared being up there by themselves because the booth is old, rickety, and drafty. Corvus feels as though she could fall through the floor at any moment, or that the ceiling could collapse when she least expects it. The dark seems darker. But Corvus likes the dark, the hums and clicks of the spinning projectors, the squares of light. Every shift, she takes five minutes to walk through the projection booth, and the walk is a meditation.

  Movies, movies, fucking movies, she says.

  The walls are covered with posters from years and years back. She peeks down each window to each theater and, sadly, no one is seated. The shows play anyway, as scheduled. Lights and sounds for the dank ether.

  Corvus knocks on the door of the manager’s office. Dick, the manager, doesn’t say anything, but Corvus can see his moving silhouette through the closed blinds, so she pushes open the locked door since it’s been known to open with a hard shoulder.

  Dick does a line of cocaine from his desk, looks up at Corvus, and says, Do you need me down there? He sniffs, then stares at the wall clock, wiping his nose with his black-and-yellow Batman tie. Corvus shakes her head and closes the door behind her. Being perplexed is part of Dick’s demeanor. He shakes a vial in the air but Corvus declines and keeps shaking her head. She sits on a swivel chair and spins once.

  Can you tell Mary, says Dick slowly, tapping the glass screen of the surveillance monitor, to fucking stop stealing? I can see her clear as fucking day.

  Corvus says, You tell her.

  I tried to tell her I loved her the other day.

  Did you ask her to move in? Wasn’t that happening? asks Corvus.

  Dick pours out the vial and prepares another line. He turns on the FM radio on the desk. The Brothers Johnson. “Strawberry Letter 23.” Dick laughs silently without telling Corvus why, then inhales to capacity.

  Feeling a wince in her throat, she asks, Have you been feeling okay? You look dead on the inside.

  He says, Being dead on the inside is a talent of mine. He says, And Mary told me she’ll think about it. She’ll think about it.

  Corvus asks, She’ll think about it?

  Dick nods. She’ll think. About it.

  Corvus says, Oh. She spins once in her chair, legs crossed. Dick turns down the music and his eyes water. The radio is too low to hear what’s playing now.

  So what are you doing here? Did you need anything? Dick asks.

  I need to get off a little early tonight. Perry has a new play and it’s opening tonight.

  Dick says, Oh, yeah, shit. I heard the ad on the radio this morning. That’s fucking crazy.

  What is? asks Corvus.

  How famous your fiancé is getting, Dick says, rubbing his hair back. What are you even doing here?

  Corvus’s face goes cold all of a sudden, and she stiffens up straight in her chair. She has the tendency to go a little cold when people ask her this type of question, and she hates explaining herself. She does what she wants. She lives how she will.

  So are we good? She waits, raising her eyebrows.

  Dick reaches into his pocket and pulls out another glass vial, one with a happy-face sticker on th
e lid. He says, Yeah, no worries. Just tell Mary she’s closing by herself tonight.

  No, Corvus says. Louis the Creep is here.

  The lights flicker. There is a knock on the door so forceful, the blinds shake. Corvus is briefly alarmed before she realizes who it is. Corvus and Dick look at each other and shake their heads in unison. She whispers, What the fuck? Speak of the devil.

  Dick finishes the cocaine on his desk and howls as Louis comes bursting through the locked door. Louis, reacting to Dick, enters howling.

  Louis says, I don’t know why you even bother locking this.

  I was just leaving, Corvus says, rushing quickly out of the room for the stairs. She makes it. Soon it is as though she was never there.

  Louis looks back at Dick after watching Corvus go. Dick wipes his eyes and says, Close the door. He motions with his hands.

  Dick keeps wiping his eyes and looks up. He sees Louis still standing there in his office and he says, No. Close the door. With you on the other side.

  The house is packed to the top rows, waves of heads and hair and flashes of light. As always, Corvus’s seat in the front row is stitched in red cursive: Reserved Only for Corvus. Michelle, right next to her, is slumped in her seat in a black dress, eating oily popcorn without a care in the world. When she looks up and exhales, her pupils are bigger than Corvus has ever seen them. They share a smile that mutes the entire auditorium, and under her breath, Corvus feels glee in needles.

  Where the fuck did you get popcorn? whispers Corvus. They don’t sell that here.

  It’s from the car, says Michelle. I found it. With her mouth full, eyes glazed, and no shame, Michelle leans farther back against the thin cushion and hugs her knees. Do you want some?

  Corvus says, That shit is like three days old. Her smile hurts her face. People are putting their jackets on their seats as ushers look blank-faced along the aisles.

  Michelle says, Seventy-two hours. She digs for another handful, faded from brandy. She smiles and says, I’m excited for the show.

  They laugh as the house lights dim and die. It’s pitch black for perhaps a single second.

  A curtain opens. Then another opens. The curtains sweep open to show a black box theater, plain black floors, and an old record player at center stage. It starts to play underneath a single spotlight. An opera. A woman’s voice in sorrow. Then two doors open, and two beams of light pour in, stage right and stage left. Nearly naked dancers dressed in what looks to be only white sashes jump on stage and flow in on cue. They are perfectly timed: explosive leaps, all sinew and leg muscle shining and contracting as they hang for so long for so high in the air.

  The look on their faces seems to belong to a place very far away from the theater, more up in the clouds than contained in a room. As the opera fades to quiet, the sound of feet landing tremendously to the floor shakes Corvus’s core a little. She leans back in her seat and calms herself. She shakes her head, takes a breath.

  Michelle leans in and says, Oh my god.

  Corvus whispers, Watch.

  A little girl walks on stage holding a tape recorder and the dancers keep dancing. They form a circle around her as though protecting her at the center and they go faster. One by one, the sashes fall and reveal scar tissue. Each dancer has some kind of wound, some look raw and painful, wet. Their faces are still and transported. A man and a woman walk in at the other end of the stage and immediately scream at each other, but the dancers keep dancing.

  Then a moment: a blue light hovers over the girl and everything else pauses. The screaming stops, the dancing stops. The actors freeze in place, mid-motion, still breathing.

  The little girl touches her face and then her chest. She touches her face as though something is missing, as though something has been stolen away, her hands are frantic. The little girl kneels down to the floor. She tries to throw up whatever’s there, the universe in her stomach, but only dry heaves. The audience listens to her dry heave for an entire minute. She kicks her head back up and from a secret pocket in her dress takes out and lights a cigarette.

  The little girl looks out to the black, scans the audience, and says, I have missed you for years. Exhaling a cloud of smoke from her nostrils and then mouth, she says, For years and years.

  She says, I’ve come to save you. She places the tape recorder on the ground and presses a button.

  Perry’s voice plays overhead, the blue light goes out:

  There were months where I did the same things for weeks at a time. Meals were interchangeable, my outfits moved on and off me, and there were days I had no opinion, my mind blank, walking home alone following palm trees overhead. I remember looking around during different parts of the day: leaving the apartment complex, cruising around the grocery store, reading at a bar after work, having a smoke. Everyone was having a different conversation than I was. All the strangers, everyone was moving quickly in and out of the rooms we were in together, anxious to be somewhere in the future. I was watching and imagining I was away from here: I was gone, walking around with Corvus in Paris, going somewhere to be with friends. I don’t know why it was always Paris in the rain.

  There were months I felt as though I had no head, or I did the same things for long stretches of time, and it became surreal. Days were less and less about anything. People often refused to make eye contact with one another or looked spaced out. I pretended I was indestructible to pass the time, painting house after house or taking whatever odd job I could find, working seven days a week, and sleeping defeated in bed when I was exhausted. I watched wall clocks and digital timers. Sometimes I would change positions in bed to try something else. My foot would be where my head was, and my head where my foot was. I slept every way I could in my sweet bed, creating solitude from malaise.

  I would walk in the daylight without wincing, thinking about Corvus. It was my favorite activity, repeating routines, in uniform or in transit, until I would be closer to her. When we were reunited, it felt so good it was as though I had survived some sort of trauma or natural disaster, being away from her. Although there were days I felt nothing, I could go as cold as nature to the awful things around me. I could be quiet in a room and feel alive.

  The building could collapse onto me and I would still tell you I needed to get back home to her.

  The tape recorder clicks off. The dancers start dancing again, the man and the woman resume screaming at each other, and the little girl collapses to the floor with a small bounce, still smoking her cigarette. Everything appears to be okay. The dancers never run into one another, limbs and torsos in rhythm, leaping even higher. A wool sweater is thrown out on the floor next to the little girl’s body and she reaches out to touch it. Thick fog from a smoke machine rolls on stage, cheesy flashes of purple and blue neon blind the audience: a new act begins.

  CHAPTER 2

  CORVUS TAKES A STINKY HIT FROM THE SPLIFF AND FEELS lighter, standing in front of a cheering crowd. With one hand on the small of her back, Perry waves to the happy faces. He pulls her hair and gently bites the back of her neck. More cheering. Feeling blissfully transported, Corvus looks at no one in particular and quietly sinks in her bones. The club is bumping and grinding, a hundred arms raise a glass to them. Some drink, some pour it everywhere, beams of light cutting through fizzy champagne sprayed in the air. The DJ, a young woman in a hoodie, pushes up her sleeves and looks Corvus dead in the eyes. Hoodie spins and spins and smiles, then touches buttons, and the crowd turns into a mob, bumping and grinding. Turn down for what. The floor is heaven, the bass draws more and more bodies to the center of the dance floor.

  Corvus feels as though she’s been here before: almost happy. Almost there. Perry kisses her behind the ear and goes off on his own into the mob, holding his drink in the air. The song has synth hooks. The walls are television screens. Every TV screen is a mouth opening, lips puckering in a Technicolor loop played over and over again. To the beat.

  Corvus moves her body through the crowd and shakes, shakes. She knows how terri
ble she can feel, how bad it can get. But it’s really good right now. It’s really fucking good right now. In almost complete darkness, she holds up her arms and closes her eyes. Then she brings her arms back down to mask her face and it feels like the greatest thing to do. The fuzzy neon flashes back on, and the beat returns. Everything, everyone around her, is dancing.

  A hand grabs her hand, hard at first.

  Corvus looks back and it’s Perry. He leans in grimacing and says, I’m so sorry.

  His face looks anxious, but because it’s so dark, it’s hard to be sure. From his grip, Corvus can tell that something is bothering him. That the room is irritating him.

  The crowd opens slightly. Perry leads Corvus up a staircase, each step lighting up as they escape away from the dance floor. The song is full of rage and sorrow and bodies are sweating all lovely up against each other.

  They open a door and enter a private room made of glass, suspended above the dance floor. Barely any sound bleeds through, only mute vibrations. Corvus can hear her heartbeat as she finds a long couch and collapses. She looks up at the chandelier and says, How perfect.

  Below, the dancing crowd looks like an ocean of heads and limbs. Perry walks back from the minibar holding a bottle of champagne.

  She takes a glass from Perry.

  She can see Michelle in a large men’s jacket, swaying back and forth and back and forth. She moves as if her eyes are closed.

  Briefly, Corvus thinks about how old she is getting.

  Perry pours champagne and taps her glass.

  He says, I love you, honey.

  I love you, says Corvus.

  Corvus leads Perry to the edge of the glass room and looks down. Thick smoke and shiny bodies. She gets a little light-headed and leans her head back. She falls ever so slightly into Perry, and he carries her away in his arms, tossing her goofily onto the couch. Once horizontal, Corvus starts laughing hysterically and Perry falls down next to her, laughing too. Manic, uncontrollable laughter.