whatcha upto bb
DONT TEXT BEA
I already paid for the hotel room anyway
We’ll both have fun and be nice to each other.
i’m always nice.
You don’t have to say sorry to me in person. I know you’re sorry. I am still very effected by your moods and I’m working on that.
Nothing at all from Ezra. I typed his name into the Instagram search bar, and nothing came up. In the past five minutes, he’d deleted his Insta. He was up. He was somewhere. He just wasn’t answering. I checked Twitter, I even checked his Facebook. He was deactivated everywhere, he was gone.
Friday, 1:22 p.m.
Back in my Honda Fit, I merged onto the 2, roaring up to Highland Park under a clear blue sky with nearly empty lanes ahead of me. I kept looking at my phone while I was driving, looking at the blank spots where Ezra’s content was supposed to be, and looking back and forth between the gray highway concrete and the white empty screen made me feel like I couldn’t actually see anything, which is a terrifying feeling to have when you’re driving. I wanted to put my phone away, but my anxiety was boiling over like a pot of pasta and I needed to do something with it. One hand on the wheel, I put in my headphones and called Lydia.
“Sup babe,” she answered.
“Hi hi hi,” I said, “Have you heard from Ezra today?”
Lydia and Ezra had slept together once, drunk but in daylight, trying to be quiet in the back bedroom of a Palm Springs Airbnb, during my twenty-fifth birthday weekend.
“Why?” Lydia said.
“I haven’t heard from him all day.”
“I haven’t heard from him either.” I heard the delicate, wispy change in audio as Lydia switched me to speakerphone. “And he didn’t answer my text from this morning. Rude.”
Ezra, twenty-five in Palm Springs, chewing a piece of his hair but smiling too big to be sheepish as he loaded the sheets from the bed we had planned to share into the washing machine to make sure the bedding was clean for me, so that after a full night of reveling, when I finally knocked out mere minutes before the arc of a new sun crested the enclosed backyard, the bed didn’t smell like his cum.
“It’s not that late in the day, babe. I’m sure he’ll text soon.”
“I have a bad feeling. Noz broke up with him last night.”
Lydia was silent for a second, then said, “Shit.”
“He deactivated all of his accounts.”
“Shit.”
“He texted me at midnight-thirty and I met him at La Cuev,” I said. “He was really broken up about it.”
“What did he say happened?”
I relayed the highlights of my convo with Ezra.
“Sounds brutal,” Lydia said.
“He was wrecked,” I said. “That’s why I’m so worried.”
“You guys do coke?”
“Yes, but who cares?” I said.
“You could have second-day anxiety.”
“Yes, I absolutely do, but there are tangible things here to be anxious about!”
“A lack of texting,” Lydia said, gently but skeptically.
“A lack of texting, plus he deactivated his accounts, plus we didn’t even go to bed all that late, plus an extra-bad thing happened.”
“But like…Ezra sometimes drops out. He’s deactivated accounts before when he’s needed breathing room from the internet and everyone.”
“He does that with other people but never with me,” I said, following the Verdugo Road exit off the highway, into the numbered surface streets of Highland Park.
“Never?”
“Not ever.”
“His thing with Nozlee is a shitshow, yes, but it’s theirs,” Lydia said. “No one but them can really know what it’s like between them, and that’s okay, that’s good even. To have private things. To go dark a little bit, when things get rough between them.”
I could never live inside Ezra’s mind and he could never live in mine, no matter how often we extended the invitation to each other; conversation is the only tool I have to give Ezra a sense of my inner life, and language is so stumbling and imperfect. True understanding is an exercise in futility, and yet, with Ezra, I try; with me, he tries. Endlessly, endlessly, we talk, across brunch tables, sipping champagne flutes filled and refilled and refilled and refilled with bottomless mimosas; curled up on scratchy outdoor blankets in the public parks and manicured lakeshores of the greater Los Angeles area; hiking Runyon Canyon in lululemons, looking for reality TV stars walking their pit bull rescues; in leather booths in the corner of dark bars: faux-tarnished cocktail bars with faux-clever drink names like “Beast of Bourbon,” narrow wine bars with rickety stools and daily specials artfully chalked onto the slate menus that decorate the walls, and all the old-school tiki bars, with their saccharine cocktails served in plastic coconuts and specials on rum punch, that have seen all the fluctuations of Los Angeles and Hollywood, all the rises and falls, and kept all the inhabitants delicately inebriated under the constant beating of a sun so hot and bright that nothing stays hidden.
While Lydia was right that I couldn’t know what it was really like for him with Noz, and while Ezra had sometimes gone inward, he’d never completely gone dark with me. If he’d sent even a single emoji I could’ve taken Lydia more seriously. If Ezra was asking for space, I would’ve given it to him, but he wasn’t asking for anything. He’d have to be present to ask, and he wasn’t. He was suddenly and completely not there.
“Plus,” Lydia said. “It’s Miggy’s weekend. He might need some time alone to process that.”
“Then why would he plan to go away with Nozlee?”
“Well maybe he didn’t know he’d want alone time,” she said.
“All these hypotheticals you’re offering up aren’t helping,” I said.
“I don’t mean this meanly, I know you’ve gone through a lot this year and I don’t want to add anything to your plate, so I really don’t mean this in a shitty way: but your ideas of what Ezra is thinking are just as hypothetical as mine, you just aren’t phrasing them as such.”
“I’m about to drive through a dead zone,” I said. “Can I call you back in a bit?”
“Yeah okay babe,” Lydia said, “But don’t just say that though. Actually call me back. Promise.”
“I promise,” I said, and clicked out of the call. I pulled up in front of the Monte Vista, it was pink in the sun.
1:40 PM Lydia
Promise me!
i promise Mom.
Do as mother says.
yes mami
Because I was answering Lydia, I remembered that I’d been texting with Bea and feeling tenderly towards her before the shock of Ezra vanishing from the internet.
DONT TEXT BEA
You don’t have to say sorry to me in person. I know you’re sorry. I am still very effected by your moods and I’m working on that.
im sorry i texted u on coke
im sorry i got bitchy.
i won’t be passive aggressive at the party.
or aggressive-aggressive.
i will hug you like everything is fine
Comfortingly, Ezra’s red, nineties-era Volvo was in his parking spot, where it should’ve been. It was a brownish red, the color of dried blood, which Ezra had picked with annoying/pretentious poetic intention; he called the money he used to buy the car “blood money” because it came from ghostwriting the memoir of an aging former A-lister who was both a Scientologist and a closet case; the book was a tool to spread the word of his cult as well as reaffirm the illusion of his heterosexuality. I’d read it because I read every book Ezra ghostwrote and had him sign the title page. I was the only person who knew the name of every single book he wrote, which thrilled me because it was
tangible evidence of how important I was to him; if I ever doubted Ezra’s affection for me or the deepness of our friendship, I could go to my bookcase and hold a book and know I was the only person in the world who both wasn’t responsible for the production of this book and also knew the name of the person who actually wrote it. From the books, I knew he loved me, so I read even this horrible straight Scientology nightmare, and noted that Ezra filled in the star’s pretend romantic relationships and sexual encounters with details from his own sex life. In my copy, I filled the margins with names of women I recognized from Ezra’s descriptions. Lydia was in there, but most of my notes were the same: Nozlee, Nozlee, Nozlee.
At Ezra’s door, closed and locked and painted the same pinky red as his building, I knocked. I realized I was tapping my foot like Sonic the Hedgehog and stopped tapping it. I waited, as still as I could possibly be.
DONT TEXT BEA
1:42 PM
i won’t be passive aggressive at the party.
or aggressive-aggressive.
i will hug you like everything is fine
Maybe everything IS fine.
I knocked. I waited. I looked at my phone and skipped through several Instagram stories from last night, of a few of my friends doing karaoke—I never, ever watch karaoke stories because they are universally shrill and terrible—and watched a video of Lydia wiggling her toes and then one of her drinking a glass of rosé and then a second one of her toes. I like videos that capture quiet moments in my friends’ lives, a cinema verité via inverted camera, where the subjects invite their audience into their gentle mundane.
Hands in my big purse, I swapped my phone for my keys. Ezra’s spare was sandwiched between my Ralph’s rewards card and my YMCA key card. I unlocked his door and peeked inside, shouting his name in case he was home. Maybe someone had stolen his phone and deactivated all his apps, not just the social media ones, as part of the theft. Ezra’s living room was empty, so I went in, turning the deadbolt closed behind me and crouching to pet Lotus. She was affectionate, pushing her head into my palm over and over again while I quietly waited to hear sounds of Ezra stirring in the kitchen or bedroom. His apartment was silent except for the scratch of Lotus’s eager claws against the wood floors. Very characteristically a cat, Lotus suddenly lost interest in my petting and darted away, leapt onto her window, and eyed me, asking what are you doing here.
“Just checking on your dad,” I whispered.
Lotus turned away to lick at her hip.
The kitchen had been cleaned, last night’s beer cans in the recycling bin. Ezra’s bedroom door was partway opened, but I couldn’t see the bed through the crack. I pushed on the door gently, hoping it would open silently just in case Ezra was still sleeping off yesterday, or masturbating with headphones on. The door, unfortunately, creaked, but it didn’t matter. Ezra’s bed was empty, and made. From my vantage point I could see into his bathroom, also empty. The fuzzy light that came through the venetian blinds hit the bed in LA-noirish stripes. I called out for Ezra in case he was…What? Hiding behind the shower curtain? Under the bed? No response, of course. Nothing on my phone.
Ezra’s slender silver laptop was sitting open on his desk, magnetically drawing me in. I fit easily into the grooves of his desk chair, flakes of his skin and stray eyebrow hairs clung to his unclean keyboard; I, of course, know all of Ezra’s passwords.
Online, I checked his Gmail first. His inbox was clogged with an annoying wave of pointless emails: newsletters from a dozen or so companies that Ezra had once purchased something from online; urgent calls for donations from the Democratic Socialists of America, from one of our senators’ reelection campaigns, from a political action group that was doing something good either in Mexico or at the Mexican border; a notice from Bank of America that his monthly statement was available. I was tempted to delete them all to save him the chore; once he turned up he might not even notice anyone had done that for him, do we even recognize the absence of our usual digital trash? I decided not to answer that particular question now. No new emails of substance.
I opened a search tab and typed “Find My iPhone” into Google. I typed in his Apple ID and the alternate password he used to protect his Apple account. Once I logged in, I clicked on the “All Devices” dropdown menu at the top of the page and saw the iPhone image that represented Ezra’s own phone; in little gray letters it was designated “offline.” I clicked on the icon anyway, and the website bloomed under my gentle clicking fingers a list of powerful options: Remove from Account, Erase iPhone, Lost Mode, Play Sound. I clicked “Play Sound” and waited. No sound.
Like I was creating an insert shot in a high-octane internet thriller, I moved the arrow icon so it hovered over the “Lost Mode” icon. I didn’t click. I waited. I did click.
The “Are you sure?” window opened up and, okay, yes, okay, I was sure. There was a small field where I could enter my custom message to whomever turned the iPhone on. I typed:
“Ezra, it’s Eve. If you get this, turn the lock mode off and call me the fuck back.”
I felt Lotus rub against my ankle before I heard her claws on the wood. “I’m going to find your dad,” I told her, closing his laptop and reaching down to rub between her ears. She wouldn’t tolerate the touch, she sprinted away, over her windowsill and out into the garden. It was then I noticed the windowsill was wiped clean of Cascarilla, and I felt a spirit gathering, the kind of spirit that liked to cut me off from the outside world. Fucking Bonnie.
I found her hovering in the kitchen, with her ghoulish smile and nasty bloodied fingernails, trying to hold onto a human form.
“Sup Bonnie,” I said.
Bonnie was the ghost of a teenage girl who lived in the house the Monte Vista once was, in the 1910s. She hated me, would’ve haunted me constantly if she had the power to do so, and she was deeply, passionately in love with Ezra, who of course couldn’t return her love for many reasons, including the fact that he couldn’t see ghosts but also because ghostlife had turned her insane. Bonnie had once tried to be cool with me, but had turned against me when I refused to be the conduit between her and Ezra so she could try to start something up with him. Once when she got violent and shitty, when she managed to log on to Ezra’s phone and text Noz a death threat from his number, we tried unsuccessfully to exorcise her. Bonnie’s hold on the building was as strong as its foundation, and she’d stayed with the building for decades while the neighborhood shifted: home to Hasidic Jewish families in the twenties and thirties when the whole neighborhood walked every Saturday morning to Temple Beth Israel; home to Hispanic families in the sixties and seventies; home to members of the Avenues gang in the nineties.
Now Bonnie hovered, mostly incorporeal, the Cascarilla keeping her at bay whenever I was around; she learned internet memes over Ezra’s unsuspecting shoulder, she listened to true-crime podcasts with him, she scanned the fashion blogs Ezra used for research for his girl novels, she tried to stir up drama. If the rest of the world could hear the voices of the unliving, I’d try to land Bonnie her own reality show.
“Sup you mangy dyke bitch,” Bonnie whisper-howled, her ghost-voice like a whistling wind through clacking tree branches at midnight. She’d gotten extra haughty and shitty since my failed exorcism, a real check on my ego.
Lotus, back on her sill, watched Bonnie obtain form. Cats can see ghosts. With the way Lotus was always knocking my protection powder astray, it’s also possible cats can communicate with them, that Bonnie and Lotus were in cahoots. Bonnie floated away from me, to Ezra’s bedroom. I followed her. She dawdled by the closet. Her almost-there body whisked around Ezra’s long-sleeved button-downs, just like any one of his ex-girlfriends.
“Bonnie honey,” I said, “were you watching us last night?”
“This isn’t your house,” Bonnie said, as usual. “This isn’t your house, get out!” All the windows rattled in their panes, a show of for
ce that I ignored.
“I’ll let you hang around today if you tell me when Ezra left.”
“You’re stupid,” she said, flickering. “You’re as bad as that other bitch. She thinks if she can’t feel me I’m not here. She thinks I don’t see how he hates eating her nasty fishy pussy.”
Bonnie hated Noz even more than she hated me.
“They broke up,” I said. “Isn’t that nice?”
Bonnie’s whole body nodded. She was thirsty for news like that.
“If you tell me when Ezra left, I’ll give you something you want,” I said. It was medium self-protection 101 to never make a deal with a spirit, but I was wigged out enough by Ezra’s prolonged silence to slide into slightly dangerous territory. Bonnie’s eyes sparkled with the prospect of a present. Ghost facial expressions are exaggerated, easy to read.
“Tell Ezra about me,” Bonnie said.
“Not a chance,” I said.
“Fine then, you can go fuck yourself.”
“There has to be something else you want,” I said. Ghosts are beings made primarily of desire, their wanting is their only drive, which is why their actions and movements take on a sexual tinge even without an alive-person’s sex drive.
“I’m a singularly focused person,” Bonnie said.
“There must be something,” I said.
“Only one thing,” Bonnie said, slipping her ghostly bod into one of Ezra’s shirts and hovering there like last night’s conquest. “Stop putting down that white stuff, so I can’t be here.”
“For a month,” I said.
“For a year,” she said.
“No deal,” I said.
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