U UP?

by Catie Disabato

  EzraIsTexting

  i know where you are and if you don’t text me back in 10 minutes, im driving to Two Bunch

  im not kidding

  i will drive to two bunch right now

  I twisted the key, I put the Honda Fit into drive, and I made the few familiar turns onto the highway. I didn’t need to turn on my Google Maps, I knew by heart how to get to the desert.

  Saturday, 6:17 p.m.

  A few years ago at an industry party with Noz, I met a wonderful old hippy cinematographer with a big white beard who told me what Two Bunch Palms was like during the Summer of Love years. (When I mentioned Two Bunch he said “Ohhhh” with all the weight of Los Angeles’s history in his exhalation. Only people that really belong in/to Los Angeles know how heavy and simultaneously light our long history is).

  In the sixties and seventies, this cinematographer told me, no one wore clothes at Two Bunch. They stepped naked from their spa-side bungalows (if they were richer or luckier) or desert-facing rooms (if they were on a budget) and descended unencumbered into the tubs and pools pumped full of water from the hot springs. Everyone got very tan under the desert sun, and no one had tan lines, their white bodies were brown and crisp. I didn’t ask him if there had been any black or Mexican people at the hot springs then, in my mind it was like a very porny version of a Linklater film, which meant there was one black guy—but no black women—integrated in the scene, and he got to say a few lines and hook up with a few of the hot girls who didn’t have any lines themselves.

  On the 10, an hour outside the city, I imagined a 1970s version of Nozlee, Miggy, Ezra, and me at Two Bunch, lying on pool chairs in a neat row, passing a joint down the line, browned, Nozlee’s and my public hair ungroomed, bushy and puffy, us naked together, our eyes closed to keep from burning our eyeballs on the sharp yellow sun, at night we’d walk barefoot around our suite, Ezra would cook steaks on the grill with meat tongs in one hand and a cigarette in the other, Ezra’s hair would be luxuriously long, Miggy would pour red wine into four glasses, and after dinner Nozlee would follow me into the bathroom and she’d tell me that she could only get two Quaaludes and that she wanted me to have the other one and after we took them, we’d go into one of the bedrooms together and lie on our sides, looking at each other as our eyes flickered and clouded over, and in our heavy downer daze we wouldn’t want to move or turn over so we’d spend hours looking at each other’s faces, memorizing the bumps and the lines, memorizing the shape of each other’s nostrils, memorizing the arch of each other’s eyebrows, memorizing the pink tips of each other’s tongues.

  On the road, I thought only of these fake versions of my friends, and swiped away any thoughts of the real ones and what they might think when they saw me in a place I wasn’t supposed to be.

  The entire drive to Desert Hot Springs is unearthly beautiful, but the best part is the last forty-five minutes. First, the 10 winds through a desert mountain range, red and camel colored, made of rock that seems precariously close to crumbling; after the mountains, the highway bursts into a blustery valley, where LED signs warn about the gusty winds; then the road continues through a field of gigantic white wind turbines, mining the wind for energy, looking like future technology, like what Tomorrowland is supposed to make you feel, but doesn’t.

  I turned off the 10 onto the CA-62, a desert road that took me from the highway-side wind machine spectacles into the real heart of the desert landscape: rock formations in the distance that look like a giant child was making towers out of stones; spindly Joshua trees that puff and prickle like cacti; sandscape as far as the eye can see, and the eye can see very far, the skyline is uncluttered and vast and very blue. It’s like driving on the moon, and at this point in the landscape, I was almost there.

  The road leading to Two Bunch is called Two Bunch Palms Trail; the trail dead-ends at the guarded gates that protect the entrance to the historic, exclusive spa. A man in a sand-colored polo shirt walked out of the guard stand and approached my car; he had a clipboard. I rolled down the window and the hot breath of the desert air exhaled into my car.

  “Name?” he said.

  “I’m not staying the night,” I said. “I’m just visiting some friends.”

  “Well, yes, they would have put down your name as their guest.”

  “Well, no, actually, I wanted this to be a surprise.”

  “Perhaps you can call them and they can call me here at the guard stand to let you in?” he said.

  “I just said, I want it to be a surprise,” I insisted.

  “Unfortunately our hotel and hot springs are not open to visitors, just guests of guests,” he insisted right back.

  “You have to buy a hotel room to get in?” I asked, trying to sound scandalized.

  “We welcome guests on a day pass to the spa,” he replied, with perfect snobbery.

  “How much is a day pass?”

  “Our day rate for use of the hot springs use only, no food or spa treatments, is fifty dollars.”

  Ridiculous. I handed over my credit card; I didn’t even consider calling Ezra, who probably wouldn’t answer, or Nozlee, who it seemed would definitely answer, but that would mean unblocking her number, which was something I still couldn’t do. The guard, having won, happily retreated to his little station to steal fifty dollars from me so I could be allowed to enter.

  The guard smugly handed me a different, smaller clipboard. “Sign here.”

  I signed and wrenched my card out from under the metal clamp.

  “Follow this road to find our guest parking lot,” he said, now kindly, now that I was officially a guest. “You must always be wearing a bathing suit at the public pools.” The times, they are a-changing.

  I rolled up my window with only the barest mumbled thank you. He lifted the gate and I was allowed to drive inside. Immediately, I was swallowed into a totally different atmosphere, the vast, dry, empty desert gone. I was surrounded by vegetation: palm trees, cacti so big they towered over me, olive trees creating pockets of shade, even grass. The roads were graveled with white rocks that sparkled and reflected the sun. I drove slowly inside this elegance, I parked where I was supposed to, I slammed my door shut. It was a million degrees outside and sweat sprung out of my face at my hairline, I knew that the part of my forehead under my bangs and the part of my nose under my glasses frames would soon be soaked.

  Though it should’ve been impossible to deny the fact that I’d driven into the desert to crash Ezra’s weekend and force him to speak to me, the heat made everything simmer like a mirage and my choices seemed unreal to me. I trotted down to the public hot springs, with the energy of an invited friend whose arrival was eagerly anticipated. I didn’t, couldn’t, entertain any other vibe.

  Two Bunch is all about the springs, and they sprawl and twist, with lots of semiprivate areas shaded by the dozens of towering palm trees; the light was all dappled, everywhere I glanced. I wove around the kidney-shaped concrete pools, and the oval baths, and the wooden tubs with tarnished silver faucets that guests could fill with whatever desired combination of hot and cold spring water, to lounge in like a water lily in a pond. The guests themselves were plentiful and relaxed-seeming, all wearing as little as possible, pale beige linen or blue-and-white-striped bathing suits. I was looking in every pool, at every lounge chair, circling and doubling back, when I got semi-lost in the maze of tubs and seating areas, and I kept accidentally making eye contact with people I didn’t know who were all taller and prettier than me, and I was still wearing my jeans and my tan Timberlands, and the Timberlands especially looked insane in the context of Two Bunch, and I was sweating out the drinks I’d had at Verdugo and maybe they could all smell it on me. The air was so dry I felt my lips chapping at the edges and I knew that, especially with all the coke and eggshell I’d been snorting all weekend, I’d eventually get a bloody nose. I looked insane enough to feel self-conscious, whic
h is unusual for me, and since I hadn’t made a friend of the security guard, I was a bit paranoid about someone alerting the staff to the frantic sweaty girl running around like she’d lost her child. Now, finding Ezra and Noz had become a necessity, and I started to feel frantic in my search; my strange presence wouldn’t make sense without them.

  I scurried over to the gravelly road/path that ringed the Two Bunch compound like a moat, and I looked more normal there, like I was the kind of person who would go on a desert hike while the day was still hot—this insane kind of person does exist, must exist. The sun was starting to set over the desert rocks, the glare of the sun was getting close to eye level, which made me squint even behind my sunglasses. Not even a single thread of wind disturbed the stillness of the leaves on the olive and tamarisk trees as I walked by them, underneath their partial shade. The ghosts of Two Bunch all hummed happily.

  I turned right, down the first of many side roads that grew off the main path and led down to hotel rooms and bungalows and villas. I wandered towards a grouping of four hotel rooms. Outside the first was a stranger smoking; outside the second a bathing suit I didn’t recognize was drying on a deck chair; the curtains were drawn on the third and I watched an unfamiliar woman put in an earring; I walked up to the fourth and knocked on the door. I tapped my foot like Sonic the Hedgehog, until I heard someone moving inside the room. The door opened, I saw a sliver of an arm first, dark brown, then the whole body of some black hipster dude wearing tortoiseshell glasses and a faded MTV Spring Break tank top that he’d probably paid eighty dollars for at the good thrift store in Highland Park.

  “Sorry,” I said fast, before he’d even gotten a good look at me, “Wrong room.”

  I turned and hurried back up the path.

  “Who was that?” I heard a higher male voice ask.

  “Wrong room,” the guy replied, and the door clicked shut.

  I looked down while I walked the next stretch of path, to keep the sun out of my eyes. The next side road led, twisting, down to the Casablanca Suites, a villa, the most expensive accommodations available at Two Bunch and big enough for four; no way they would’ve rented it; if they had rented it, no way Ezra wouldn’t have mentioned that newsworthy fact when he first told me he’d planned a Two Bunch trip for this weekend. The sun continued menacing me, following me down the path. I imagined the possibility that Noz and Ezra had decided, last minute, to stay at some other hotel, and pushed myself to walk faster, heart and lungs pumping. I was scorched and the sun didn’t care about me.

  The third side road led past a small parking lot; Noz’s red Fit was parked there. I examined the car, maybe it was someone else’s red Fit, but there were the scratches on the left side from when she tried to pull into a compact spot between two badly parked SUVs in the overstuffed parking lot of the Hollywood Arclight movie theater on a Saturday night; I peered into the hatchback trunk and saw her pink yoga mat and that lime-green hoodie she wore over crop tops when we decided to stay up into the dark cold hours of a Los Angeles winter night.

  There were only two doorways to choose from in this little cluster, which meant Ezra had booked a suite-sized room for them. I’d seen pictures of them online, they had decks out back that were maybe private enough that people could fuck out there late at night, like coyotes, under the speckled desert sky. I stood in front of the two suites, their front walls were glass. The one on the left had the curtains drawn open, that room was empty; the one on the left had the curtains snuggly closed.

  The choice stopped me in my tracks and despite the heat, I felt jolted suddenly into the reality of my situation; that I was so frantic to get rid of my bad feelings that I’d driven all the way into the desert; the only indication I was doing so, a text to a number that had probably blocked me.

  “Are they in there?” I said out loud, to whatever desert spirit might be listening, perhaps happy enough to provide guidance to someone on a quest. If I stayed long enough in this place would the trees start to talk to me like in some bad movie? Or would I sour all the ghosts with my presence, making them frantic and homicidal?

  “Someone tell me,” I said to a nearby tree, “should I knock?”

  Nothing answered. Contented spirits don’t give a fuck, or maybe they served only that shaman. I’m so fucking embarrassing. I knocked on the door, and Nozlee answered.

  “Fuck,” she said, “Oh fuck.”

  “I texted,” I said, which was technically true.

  She turned away from me, looked over her shoulder—she spoke, “What do I do?”—and when she turned I could see around her body to the rest of the room. Ezra was sitting on the couch. Ezra ran his hands over his shaved head the way he used to run them through his hair, it looked good now, someone had fixed it, Ezra was looking at me like, lol, he’d seen a ghost.

  “You should just fucking let her in,” I heard Miggy say. Then Nozlee opened the door a little wider and my dead best friend who had told me himself that he wasn’t able to obtain ghostly form, that he was only able to text me, he was there, sitting on the bed with Ezra.

  “What!?” I shouted. “What!?” It wasn’t shock that made me shout, it was a specific desire to cause a scene. It was a pleasurable feeling, actually, for all the anxiety I’d been feeling to quickly calcify into anger, to return me to the role that felt much more comfortable to inhabit, not the frantic nightmare friend who’d followed them into the desert, but the wronged party, vindicated in my choices. I’d been lied to, obviously, and every single fucking person in the entire Two Bunch Palms complex would know about it and be punished for proximity. I’d get Nozlee and Ezra kicked out of their nice hotel room; they could just fuck off. “You all can just fuck off,” I shouted.

  Ezra sprang up, he grabbed my shoulder and pulled me inside, and slammed the door behind him, and I was in it with them now. I shrugged my shoulder as violently as I could and Ezra glared at me and aggressively flung himself back down on the couch, and part of his body passed through Miggy’s body.

  “Oh!” Noz said as Ezra’s body went through Miggy’s.

  It didn’t seem to bother Miggy a bit, he readjusted slightly so they were sitting like two people would normally sit next to each other if one wasn’t a ghost.

  “Oh shit, did I sit on him again?” Ezra said.

  “Actually more like in me, but whatever,” Miggy said.

  “It’s fine,” Nozlee said to Ezra.

  “It certainly isn’t fucking fine,” I said, picking my moment to remind them how I’d been lied to by Miggy and fucked over by Noz and ignored by Ezra.

  “Oh, you’re pissed?” Ezra said. “That’s fucking ridiculous, Eve.”

  “He told me he didn’t have a body!” I shouted.

  “So fucking what, you were texting,” Ezra shouted back. “You didn’t tell me he was still around!”

  “I wanted—” I stopped. What had I wanted? “That doesn’t excuse ghosting me all weekend,” I said.

  “I’m mad at you,” Ezra said. “That’s what mad people do.”

  Noz slunk into a corner and sank down into an armchair. She put an indigo blue pillow on her lap for protection. I wanted very badly to find the door to the bedroom and to lie in the dark under the covers for a few hours, but if I did that maybe they wouldn’t ever give me the full explanation of what was going on. I didn’t want to sit on the couch with both Ezra and Miggy, who had betrayed me, so instead I sank to the ground and looked at the patterned tile. Miggy had the decency to look remorseful. The four of us were together again.

  I looked up from the tile and through the glass of the suite’s sliding glass door, and for a second I expected to see the blue flicker of water, like the swimming pool in that house in the Hollywood Hills. The room was dark, now, the sun was almost down. Noz turned on the lamp next to her chair and Ezra twisted to hit a switch on the wall, which turned the overhead light on. The furniture was cream colored, the accents w
ere all blue, and we glowed in the lamplight.

  “How long have you had non-corporal form?” I asked Miggy.

  “Since the beginning pretty much, since I first texted you,” he said.

  “He’s telling Eve stuff you already heard, about when she found his body,” Noz said. She was translating for Ezra, who couldn’t see or hear Miggy.

  “Can we just talk for a second?” I asked Ezra and Noz.

  Ezra scowled, his face had never expressed such brash displeasure with me. I understood suddenly the way some of his ex-girlfriends and ex-flings and ex-somethings carried still such vitriol for him, why some of our mutual acquaintances casually remarked that it was really bad to get in a fight with Ezra; he looked like someone who would fling a rock at your head and hang around after to watch you bleed out.

  Nozlee stood up, “C’mon,” she said to Ezra.

  “Of course you’d do whatever she asked,” Ezra snapped. I didn’t understand, but I didn’t dwell, because he was nevertheless standing up. He grabbed his cigarettes and Nozlee followed him out to that private back porch I’d imagined them fucking on.

  “They don’t seem like they’re back together,” I said.

  “They’re not,” Miggy said.

  I stood up and sat next to him on the couch. I wanted to hug him so badly.

  “I want to hug you so badly,” I said.

  “Me too.”

  I held out my hand, palm up, and he held out his ghost hand, palm down, and rested it right on top of mine, and I could see that our hands were together but I couldn’t feel him and he couldn’t feel me. I moved away first. Miggy reached into his pocket and pulled out a ghost version of his cell phone, he typed something on it, then nudged me. I shifted onto my left hip and pulled my cell out of my right pocket; I had a bunch of new junk on my phone that I ignored, and a new message from Miggy.