John Shirley - Wetbones Read online

  Culver City, Los Angels

  More and more, Prentice was afraid of going to bed. Lately his pattern had been to lie there for at least an hour, his mind teeming and morbid, trying to think about anything but Jeff and Mitch, Amy and Arthwright; and thinking almost entirely about Jeff, Mitch, Amy and Arthwright.

  He was staying at Jeff's now, which was probably a mistake. Sleeping on the couch in the office. It's back folded down so it made a pretty decent single bed, except for that valley down its middle, but he had some privacy here, and he was tired, so he should be able to sleep.

  Should, but couldn't. Instead, he'd putter about the office, toying with Jeff's Japanese monster collection, looking at the hoard of comics and pulps; he'd pull out a book, flip through it, read a bit, put it back, and be unable to remember any of what he'd read.

  It was dark out, and Prentice had the shades drawn. He was sitting on the edge of the sheet-covered couch in the dim room in his underwear, restless and worried. Thinking about Saturday. He'd be going out there Saturday. He'd be able to clear it all up then . . . And Arthwright would give him the break he needed . . .

  But did he want to belong to Arthwright? After what he'd realized about the mirror in the guest bedroom? And then there was the way Arthwright had manipulated Prentice into doing his dirty work for him. Prentice had successfully talked Jeff into holding off on the court orders. They'd found a private detective referred by a cop - who was already looking for a missing teenager, a guy named Blume. That was a good start.

  But still. It had been manipulation. Arthwright puppeting Prentice who puppeted Jeff. And then Arthwright prompting Lissa to check up on Prentice . . .

  So what? Prentice told himself Arthwright was no more a sick manipulator than most producers in the business. It came with the territory.

  Prentice glanced at Jeff's word-processor; in the gloom its monitor was a ghostly, square head propped on the desk. Jeff had been out taking meetings all day and he'd let Prentice use the computer for writing, in the hopes of getting a start on the spec script that Jeff and Buddy were counselling him to write. Prentice had produced exactly two pages of uninspired melodrama. Which he hadn't bothered to save.

  On a shelf above the desk, the radio chattered to itself like a cancer patient trying to stay cheerful. The DJ finally finished blathering vacantly and put on a song. It was Iggy Pop's song, "Butt Town."

  All over Butt Town

  Values are thrown down . . .

  But in Butt Town I'm learnin'

  in Butt Town, I'm earnin'

  in Butt Town I'm turnin'

  into my

  worst nightmare . . .

  Prentice stared at the radio as if a hand had reached out of it and slapped him in the face. He stabbed a finger at the button, switched it off before Iggy could say it again.

  "Fuck you, Iggy," Prentice muttered. He'd like to have flung the radio against the wall. But it was Jeff's.

  Instead, hoping to ease some tension, he stretched out on the folded-down sofa and jerked off. It didn't help much. "Turning into my worst nightmare," Prentice muttered, stretching out on the sheets.

  He couldn't quite bring himself to turn off the desk lamp.

  Rest, he thought, and then get up, try to write some more, turn the restlessness into something productive.

  He laid an arm over his eyes and stared into the dull flashes the pressure made on his eyeballs. It might have been an hour later when he went to sleep.

  The dream, anyway, seemed to sidle up to him before he was truly asleep. Or was he dreaming about lying on the sofabed?

  Amy was sitting on the arm of the sofa, near Prentice's feet. She looked good. Healthy. She wore blue jeans and a t-shirt, barefoot - then she wore lingerie and pumps. Then she wore blue jeans and a t-shirt again - it changed from second to second. She said, "That bitch is going to eat you alive, you know that don't you?"

  "What?" he asked sleepily.

  "You heard me."

  They were walking through a shopping mall, now. Some generic shopping mall. He glanced at Amy and saw with a shock that she was desiccated and mangled again, as she had been in the morgue. She smelled of embalming fluid. A walking corpse, nude and mummy-like, but not shambling, walking perkily along with a purse on one arm, impatiently passing a troop of Girl Scouts selling cookies. She shook her head at them, No, she didn't want any cookies. They didn't react to her appearance. Lots of people in the mall were dead.

  He looked away from her and said, "I don't want to see you like this. And don't say, 'Like what?"

  She said, "It's your dream. Make me something else. By taking me back to somewhere else . . ."

  He put a hand over his eyes - and when he removed it he was in their Manhattan apartment, sitting with his arm around her, doing something she'd loved to do: watch a foreign film on videotape while drinking a bottle of red wine.

  It was Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits. Prentice and Amy were cuddled comfortably on a big floor pillow, leaning back against the foot of her bed, watching the film. He felt warm and secure; he knew she felt the same way. For a moment or two.

  Then he felt her go tense. "Nothing can stay like this," she said. "Why can't anything sustain for more than a few minutes? Or more than an hour at most? I could accept the downsides of life if there were more upsides. But there's an imbalance. It's mostly either downsides or dull gray areas, you know what I mean?"

  "Yes," he said wearily. "I know what you mean." He was thinking that he was simply hearing the point

  of view that came when her depression hit her. She couldn't sustain simple warmth long, it was true. It was either a glittering up or a slide downward. There were few plateaus for Amy.

  For the hundredth time he wondered how much of it was "a neurochemical imbalance" and how much was just the skew of her personality, her tendency to subvert happiness because of some childhood trauma. If it was the latter, it was something that could be overcome. But if he raised that point she'd get defensive . . .

  Maybe he should just cut her loose. She was a basket-case and she didn't want to really do anything about it. He ought to let her basket drift like the baby Moses on the river. Trust that somebody would find her. He just couldn't take responsibility for another person's sanity.

  "And that's what you did," Fellini's heroine said, on the TV screen, turning to look at him. "You cut Amy loose, didn't you Prentice?"

  Prentice looked at Amy accusingly. "Don't put things in the movie. It's not respectful to the artist."

  "You pushed me into leaving you," Amy said. "You wanted to get away from me. It was simple as that, wasn't it, Tommy? You had that affair and let me find out and then you acted as if you were sorry and wanted to go on but you were about as happy as a snail in a saltshaker -"

  "A very colourful turn of phrase, Amy. I felt like a snail in a saltshaker. I felt like I was burning up with you. I had to babysit you constantly, and reassure you all the time, tell you it was all right ten thousand ways, and then endure your up moments - you were obnoxious when you were up as often as you were charming."

  ''So you cut me loose. Tom, how much is enough love? How much giving in love is too much? How do you tally it? You have units of love worked out on a calculator? How did you decide you were giving too much? You weren't the only one who gave. You could get pretty fucking moody yourself. You were really a pain in the ass when you were the aggrieved, sulking artiste because the screenplay was not going right or the critics had fucked you over."

  "Yeah, probably. But it was a tempest in a teapot compared to your cyclone, Amy."

  "To you. Anyway, I don't give up all that easily, Tommy. You're not really going to that party on Saturday, are you?"

  He was staring at her. The golden reds and silky yellows with which Fellini had coloured his film were playing across her face, and the shadows seemed to run together in her eyesockets . . . to deepen in her cheeks and to etch out her breastbone . . .

  She was sinking into herself. Shrivelling. Like the sna
il. Like the girl in the morgue.

  He could smell the death on her.

  He felt a purer fear, in that moment, than any he'd felt since early childhood. A four year old child was only four years and a few months from nullity - from the echoing void of pre-consciousness. That's why, he thought, small children could fear so deeply: in some visceral way, they remembered death.

  Prentice shrank, too, from the blacklight, the negative shine of that fear truly pure and childlike fear of death.

  He wrenched himself awake. Sat up on the sofa in Jeff's office, shaking and stupid with disorientation. That dream had been too well organized. It was far

  more coherent and thoughtful, in its argumentation and insights, than dreams ever were, in Prentice's experience. Dreams, if they meant anything, were metaphor. This one had been more like a goddamn essay . . .

  And Amy was still with him. Her presence was almost palpable in the dim, cluttered office. He could taste Amy. He could smell her. He could feel her hair under his fingers.

  He shook himself, muttering, "Cut it the fuck out," He went to get himself a drink, in the kitchen; some of Jeff's German stuff, Jaegermeister, chilled in the freezer! He poured himself a stiff one and drank it off. Amy drew away from him, a little. He poured himself another. Day after tomorrow was the party. Tomorrow, during the day, he'd try to get out of himself, enjoy himself. Give himself a chance to see things fresh . . .

  Almost eleven-thirty, Friday morning. Prentice was strolling down Melrose Avenue. It was sunny but not yet too hot, and the street, on this block anyway, was reasonably clean. The exercise felt good, and the smog was mild. He was almost in a good mood.

  He passed a newspaper vending machine, and glimpsed some headlines. LAPD ADMITS "WETBONES" IS HOMICIDE. He ignored it, very deliberately. He didn't want to know about whatever it was.

  Not today, anyway.

  He checked out a few of the displays in the windows of the self-consciously arty boutiques. Glanced over a display of black rubber outfits for casual wear. He

  imagined hearing Amy comment: How hot and sweaty and itchy are you willing to be for fashion?

  Farther on, a mannequin that had been spraypainted in gold and silver graffiti was posed like a fan of Faith No More in mid hiphop frenzy, wearing a black and red lace miniskirt and corset; it was dancing in a tangle of barbed wire. Now that corset and skirt I love, Prentice imagined Amy saying. I'm such a sucker for underwear that can disguise itself as a dress . . . I wonder how much it is . . .

  The boutique was playing a song by The Cars that he remembered, called "You Wear Those Eyes." Amy had been enamoured of The Cars. Ric Ocasek was "just so grotesquely adorable". Prentice couldn't stand Ocasek's singing voice. Now he found himself singing along. Which was surprising - he was sure he'd never learned the lyrics to this one. The singing sounded better to him now.

  He realized he was hungry and thirsty and his legs were hurting. I'm in rotten shape, he thought. He stopped in at a cafe that attempted to be a Parisian bistro, and ordered soup, bread, brie, and capuccino. Amy would have found the soup too thick with stock, but he liked it that way.

  He ate and rested. Buzzing a little on the capuccino, he paid the check and continued down the street, stopping in at a couple of galleries. One of them was the sort that sell decorator art and impressionist prints to people who don't want to take chances on their own taste. He saw a couple of coloured etchings there by the same artist who'd done the pictures in Arthwright's guest room. He thought about calling Lissa, and asking her if she wanted to join him, take a turn about the galleries with him. No, don't be pushy.

  He moved on to a gallery of local artists, paintings by gay neoexpressionists with frantic, guilt-edged images of copulation and self mutilation. He thought about Mitch's arms . . .

  He hurried on to another artist: Gaudy paintings that were really arty political cartoons: Bush and Gorbacev jacking each other off on a heap of starving, suffering underclass.

  These pictures, Amy said, are too didactic to last beyond the time. The curse of preachiness.

  What Amy would have said, he reminded himself.

  There was one painting that was more personal than political: A woman alone, on foot, on a freeway overpass, evidently despite all the painter's cartoonish hysteria - considering jumping off the bridge into the thick, brutish flow of traffic beneath.

  Looking at it, Prentice felt a surge of reawakened memory. Memory of a feeling, mostly: what he'd felt when Amy had first left him. A sense of betrayal mixed with relief. Or was that what Amy had felt? He wasn't sure. He wanted her, suddenly, in his arms . . . He could almost feel her. could taste her lips, the distinctive flavour of her flesh and her favourite lipstick.

  He began to feel something else, then. A suspicion.

  All morning and into the afternoon, the feeling had been there. A sense of being dogged. Followed by Amy, of course. Not a feeling that she was in him . . . it wasn't like possession . . . more like she was looking over his shoulder, whispering in his ear, wreathing him with some lost essence.

  He saw himself, then, as she'd seen him that day. The day they'd broken up. Tom Prentice with a refined sneer, a supercilious disdain at what he'd called her "childish over-reaction" at the affair he'd had. He saw

  clearly, beyond the unconvincing sneer, the fear and uncertainty briefly flickering in his face. The self loathing.

  He had abandoned her. He had failed her and driven her away and she'd gone out into the urban-primeval outer darkness of Los Angeles and gone alone . . .

  He wanted to put a fist through the painting of a woman alone on the overpass . . .

  He turned and hurried out of the gallery, looking for a bar. He found a fern bar, with lots of brass and plants and abstract paintings - abstractions were more to his taste at the moment, they were safer - and he drank a double Jaegermeister. He cast about for a way to get his mind clear of Amy.

  Found his way to the pay phone at the back of the bar. Jeff had given him permission to have messages left on his answering machine. He called up Jeff's number and pressed the appropriate touchtone buttons to get the machine to reel out its messages over the phone. He had to wait out three irrelevant messages for Jeff before there was one for him. It was Buddy. "Tom, this is Buddy - if I got it right, you're at this number - um, just wanted you to know that Arthwright called, he is interested in putting up a little money for your treatment . . ."

  Prentice thought: And Zack says thanks for the blow job.

  Buddy went on, "Um, I don't know how you pulled off that miracle but Zack says he's going to talk to you a little more about it at the party, whatever party that is - how come I'm not invited? - and I just wanted to tell you, don't accept any offers on your own, just smile and say, 'Sounds great - call Buddy!' Okay? Catchya later, pal. Hang in there."

  A new record for Buddy on message length. Usually it was, "Hey I think we got a nibble, give me a call." Startled into loquacity, apparently, by Arthwright's willingness to cough up some cash.

  Well. That was good, then. He should be happy about it.

  He really should.

  8

  The Doublekey Ranch, near Malibu

  As Mitch's body healed, his mind began to flake away. Sometimes he heard a murmur of voices when he was sure the building and the grounds outside were empty. After a while he realized he was hearing the roses outside the window talking to one another.

  When the Handy Man came into the room, Mitch didn't recognize him, at first. He looked the same as always, but somehow no identity clung to his familiar face. To Mitch this creature was just a moving module of flesh and purpose; an apotheosis of the minatory presence of this place. A thing that moved about the room like a videogame character, doing this and that; beeping now and then. Then he went away. Game Over.

  Eurydice's voice brought Mitch back to himself. "Mitch?"

  It came muffled through the wall.

  "Come and talk to me!"

  They'd spoken earlier, through the crack
, but Mitch

  hadn't been able to say much. "Oh we're just here, is all," he'd said. "I gotta lay down now. 'Bye."

  How long ago had that been? Hours. He'd sat on the edge of the bed staring at the wallpaper, letting his eyes go in and out of focus. For how many hours? He shrugged, and got up from the bed, went to the wall, pushed the dresser out of the way, and crouched next to the crack.

  "Mitch . . . Are you okay?"

  Suddenly his pulse was pounding, his mouth was dry. "Eurydice," he said. "I'm geeking in here. I'm losin' it."

  He could tell she was trying not to break down as she said, "How long you been there?"

  "I don't know. Some days. Maybe some weeks. I'm not sure. They don't let me out at all. I go into some weird places in my head. I saw some shit in that room you're in. And outside. Eury, we gotta . . ."

  They had to what? He wasn't really sure.

  "Can't get out the window," she said. "Your room like that, too?"

  "Yeah. There's no attic trap doors, there's nothing. No way to get out."

  "The only way out is to jump somebody. When they come in the door."

  He frowned. Did she really think that was possible? "They wouldn't let that happen. They know what you're doing. They know when you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake. They won't let us. No."

  "There always be some way! Motherfuckers. Fucking motherfuckers lied, really trickin' us off, they . . ."

  "We have to just stay here. Maybe they'll let us have lots of head syrup."

  "Don't talk about that!" she hissed. He heard her thump the wall in her anger. "Goddamn it, why you such

  a limp dick? We gone get out of here, Mitchie. We . . ."

  "I was always in love with you," he said, suddenly.

  She was silent for a minute. Then she said, "You tell me when we get out."

  "We can't."

  "Mitch - !"

  "Don't get mad. We can't. Except . . . Um . . ."

  "Except how?"

  "Except if we . . . become like them. We got to learn to be what they are . . ."

  Watts, Los Angeles