Numb (18 page)

Emilia got up and left the room.

Still lying on her bed, I said, “So, I've been thinking about California.” I hadn't been, but I grew more
scared by the moment that an ending, a bad one, approached. Mal gone, Karen demanding something from me. I drifted.

Emilia sat in the bathroom, gasping as she dripped hydrogen peroxide into the small cuts and bite marks I'd just left on her body. I'd once offered to clean them for her, but she'd laughed and said that I only needed to worry about what I did
to
her, not what I could do
for
her. I didn't understand the difference.

I said, “I've been thinking about it a lot, and I was thinking, I could go with you.”

She didn't respond, so I rolled off the bed and went to the bathroom door and repeated the offer.

“I heard you,” she said. She didn't look at me. She sat on the closed toilet lid, dabbing a cotton ball over a cut on her thigh. When had I done that? I couldn't recall. The white panties she wore had a drop of blood on them. I wondered at how many articles of clothing might have been ruined during our time together.

“So,” I said, “what do you think?”

“Why are you asking?” She concentrated on her wounds. Mine could wait.

“I guess I'm trying to figure out where I might be in the next few years.”

She smirked and her eyes flashed at me. She stood and tossed some bloody cotton balls into the garbage. “Jesus. You actually, what, see us settling down somewhere? With some little house and a yard and a fence?”

My stupidity rushed over me and I felt suddenly sweaty. I walked back to the bedroom. “Where are my clothes?”

The medicine cabinet snapped open and shut as she pulled out a box of bandages. She followed me into the bedroom and threw them on the bed. “We don't even live together, for God's sake.”

I pulled my jeans on. Before pulling on my shirt I realized that I hadn't cleaned my newest wounds from the afternoon spent bloodying her bed. They still wept blood and should have been cleaned and bandaged. Instead I pulled the shirt on. The blood would show through it, probably ruin it, but I had to get out of her apartment.

Emilia stood in the doorway, watching me. She was skinnier than I remembered, thinner by a hand's width.

She said, “I mean, what were you hoping for?”

I grabbed my shoes and pulled one on. “I don't know.” I really didn't. “I don't think I hope for anything.”

“Well, you must. You asked the question, and you're upset at my answer.” She disappeared into the bathroom again.

I tried to imagine she was right, but I couldn't decide what I hoped for, if anything. Somewhere beneath my annoyance at her answers, my fears about Hiko discovering my relationship, my distrust of Mal and Michael and others who cheered on my performances or claimed rights due to friendship, somewhere under all of
that there must have been some sort of hope or expectation. There had to be. Mal would have known what he wanted. He would have demanded and gotten an answer from her.

I tried to find a path back to her front door, but boxes blocked me in. I looked over the walls of stacked cartons, wondered what they were filled with and how I'd gotten past them. Emilia stood in the hallway and watched me try to go.

“I know you're upset about your friend dying, but that doesn't mean that you and I have something more than whatever this was.”

I shut the door behind me. I was left with little consolation other than the fact that she would take some small part of me with her to California. It would be the little black flecks of blood sprinkled over her sheets and clothes, unless she managed to do some laundry before leaving.

The next day I went to the tiny apartment Karen and Mal had shared and which Karen now haunted alone. New pictures peppered the walls. Karen let me walk around for a moment, as if in a museum. I examined each picture and, sadly, found most of them were of Karen and Mal. He looked happier in the pictures than I remembered him to be in person. Many were taken at parties or bars, with dark crowds behind and lighting that caught the sweat and exhaustion on him and Karen. There was one black-and-white photo taken in a park.
They were walking away from the camera and looking at each other, smiling, clearly happy in a way only they knew. The picture caught and held me. I fingered the scar on the back of my hand where I'd stapled my most recent cut shut.

Karen circled through the room, unsure what to do with me there. “So you didn't find anything?”

“No, sorry. I had some stuff, but Mal took it.”

“The jump equipment, right? I had a feeling he was going to do something incredibly stupid, so I made him throw it out. I believed him when he said he had. But you had it, right? You held it for him.”

Karen stood in her kitchen and tried to avoid looking at me as she put dishes away.

I said, “I looked around, but I didn't have anything else.” She waved my comment away.

“I really don't care about that anymore. Until last night I wanted to get a hold of everything of his that I could. I didn't know what I wanted it for, but I knew I wanted it. Then I suddenly had an idea. I literally thought,
I'll take all the bastard's stuff and I'll burn it
. Can you believe that? For a second I didn't remember how he died. I was just so mad I thought,
Burn it
.”

Her eyes filled with tears and she put a chipped blue dish on the counter and walked away. I'd never been in the apartment during the day. Brilliant sunlight poured through the windows. Outside, kids filled a basketball court with pleasant screams. I longed to be out there.
I wanted to be near laughter, anywhere I could find it, even on a basketball court filled with strangers.

I said, “Why don't we go outside for a quick walk?”

“No. I just wanted to talk to you for a moment, then you can go.” She sat down on the threadbare sofa and searched around a second, then found a pile of papers and flipped through them. “I just wanted to let you know that there's some stuff of you online.”

I didn't know how this related to Mal. “Some of the old videos? Me with a lion?”

“No, new stuff. You having sex.”

She pulled a page from the pile and held it out for me. At first I couldn't figure out what angle to view the grainy image from. Finally, I realized it was a shot of a window and through the window were two people on a bed.

Karen leaned back, the pile of papers on her lap. “I was doing research on you and found this. About two days ago.”

“This doesn't look like me.”

“Not that shot, but that's only the still that I printed out. The film is pretty clear, actually. Some guy sneaking around on fire escapes and he gets that. He recognized you and now it's out there for the world. It's you and some model. She's wearing tiger gloves.”

The paper got terribly heavy. Had there really been someone on the fire escape and wouldn't I have noticed? As I remembered everything that Emilia had done, I realized that I probably wouldn't have noticed at all.

Karen stood up and took the paper back. “You two do some pretty twisted shit. You I understand, you can't feel it. But her?”

She walked to the kitchen. When she came back she had a glass of water. She sipped at it cautiously while I tried to get my brain to work.

She put the glass down. “I wanted to tell you so that you can do the right thing and break up with Hiko.”

I blinked hard a few times, to regain focus I probably never had. “How is any of this your business?” I crinkled the paper but knew I couldn't really destroy the image it had left in my head or the dozens of other images tied to it from my many visits to Emilia.

“She's my friend. As her friend, I will keep her away from people who will do stupid things that might hurt her. You're doing that.”

I tried to call her bluff. “I'll tell her.”

“No, you won't.”

It was final. The way she cut the words off shut my mouth and held it closed, almost as if it had been stapled shut.

She walked back to the kitchen sink and refilled her glass. As she dropped ice cubes into it she glanced over her shoulder and finally looked fully at me. “You've done nothing but stand by and watch as people self-destruct around you. Now I'm going to make sure that you don't drag my friend down like Mal did me.”

“This will hurt her.”

“You hurt her. You hurt me. You hurt Mal. You could have stopped him. All he wanted was everything you fell into. You just stood there and watched him kill himself for something you don't even want, apparently.”

“I didn't do anything to Mal.”

“No, and I'm probably not being fair, but I don't care. What I'm going to do is tell Hiko. So get the hell out so I can make a phone call.”

I thought I should be angry, but I couldn't bring myself to feel it. Instead I had shame, and lots of it. I felt shorter than Karen, like a child caught doing horrible things and knowing that soon punishment would fall, punishment deserving and terrible. I stumbled for the door and when I turned to look at her, to make one last attempt to stop her, I realized I couldn't. I had done nothing to stop Mal, and maybe that amounted to pushing him. I'd not stopped him and he'd died. So I left the apartment, and as I pulled the door shut I thought that I was making my leap, just as Mal had, only mine was in the faith that Hiko wouldn't believe the news that Karen was going to tell her. I made that leap. And as I did I knew that Mal had known the moment he left the bridge that he was a dead man.

Karen kept her promise. When I got home, I found Hiko crying in the living room. I stood by the door for nearly an hour as she cried, just watching her, waiting for her to talk to me. The only thing she wanted from me was to feel the cuts and bruises Emilia had left on me. She demanded, not requested, this.

“Why do you want that?” I asked. “You don't want that. It's perverse.”

“No more perverse than being taped fucking some bitch who stabbed herself with a fork.”

I was amazed at how much information Karen had shared. Apparently nothing had been left out. I said, “How was I to know I was being taped?”

“You've been complaining about being taped doing everything else. Now you've been taped screwing someone. What the hell did you think? Her windows were open, for God's sake.”

She sat rigid, her back straight. Her body quivered. She said, “I always thought I would lose you when you got your memory back. I never thought it would be to some bitch with claws you met at a photo shoot.”

I didn't say anything for a minute. “For a blind woman you sure know a lot about the tape.”

She threw her glasses at my voice. She stood there with her eyes wide. I felt like I'd just punched her in the stomach. Her face screwed up as her anger tortured her.

I apologized and took off my shirt and pants. “Come over here,” I said.

I took her hands and guided them to my sides. Her fingers played over my cuts, the raised welts of the scratches. On her face played the pain from them that I hadn't felt.

After running her hands down my thighs and across my back, she stood before me and I reached out to touch her face. She pushed my hand away.

She said, “I never want to see you again.” She said it without any edge or tone. It was the most perfect thing anyone had ever said to me. I remained surrounded by strangers who couldn't get enough of me, and intimate friends who couldn't stand the sight of me.

“Get out.”

I'd already thrown most of my belongings out the window, so there was little packing. I left with just a bag of clothes. I moved back to the hotel.

About two weeks after I left I tried calling. She wouldn't answer.

I'D BEEN AT
the hotel for a month, spending my time the only way I knew how, and I had the dog-eared magazines and newspapers to prove it. Coverage of Mal's death had started in the tabloids and drifted into the currents that ran past mainstream newsmagazines.
Time
,
Newsweek
, even the
New York Times
picked up on the story, broadened its scope, tethered it to me, and then made me a touchstone of the independent video underground, the reality-video revolution and its impact on commercial entertainment. I refused all calls for comment. I was shown in frame-grab photos in the articles and distrusted even Michael when he told me that he could vouch for a certain reporter and that an upcoming article would be about Mal himself and not simply an opportunity to reference me and my accidental exploits.

Michael contacted me with his plan when copycat videos started to appear.

One late afternoon, rain pouring outside, I was watching CNN, sound muted, closed captioning on, when a video came on of someone who might have been me but for thirty extra pounds around the middle and a dragon tattoo across his left biceps. His face grimaced and his lips turned pale as a three-foot steel wire pierced above and below the line of his mouth, what I imagine was an offensive orifice, sewn shut. CNN's caption below this video laid his stupidity at my feet with the simple exclamation:
Numb-a-like.

My phone rang and the debate between raising the television volume or answering the phone lasted only to the end of “Hello.” It was Michael. He would help me get through my troubles and make money at the same time.

“You go to California.” He told me about recent interest in getting me into some films, possible guest spots on television. He promised exactly the opposite of what he'd done earlier. I could be sold now.

“What sort of films would they be?”

“Stuff you could relate to.”

I figured that meant they would be about me.

“You haven't been to LA. You should go. Get out of New York and get some sun. It's depressing enough here and you've had too much bad shit happen recently.”

I sat on the hotel bed, phone pressed to my ear. Above the dresser hung a mirror and I could see the mess of sheets around me, the wet towels, the scars on my sides
and shoulders, the dark circles under my eyes. I looked like Mal had when I'd run into him at the gallery. Shallow and empty. Karen's story about Mal's car wreck crashed into my head. California was probably the last place I should go, but I suddenly felt as if I'd already been there and would be revisiting what Mal and I had done before, as if Mal had promised me something that only California could give.

I said, “Why the sudden interest in me? When I suggested California months ago you said there wasn't any project for me.”

I could hear a pencil tapping on Michael's desk as he tried to think of what to say.

“It's because of Mal's death, right?”

The pencil stopped.

“Or it's that sex tape. Whatever. Okay, I'll go.”

 

TWO WEEKS LATER
I took a cab to the airport. On the cab's backseat lay a rumpled
Star
magazine. Whoever had left it behind had used it well. It was dog-eared and torn. I saw it from upside down and the woman on the cover looked like Hiko. She had dark hair but no glasses. I turned it right side up to see Emilia. I realized how dirty the pages were.

I opened it slowly. The first page of the article about her was a large photo of her in a red tank top and black
pants. She held her stomach and laughed at the camera. Her teeth were bigger than I remembered. I skimmed over the article. She was in “another” movie and I tried to remember when she'd been in a first. She “enjoyed modeling” but didn't have a lot of time for it. Los Angeles was “super fast” and she lived near Hollywood but “missed her New York City place.”

Then I saw my name. “She still sees the enigmatic performer whose pain resistance was demonstrated when a film of them engaged in a rough intimacy wound up on the Web.”

It went on to say that I lived near her and we flew in and out of LA together. The article ended with a photo of Emilia and a man, his arm around her waist, both in baseball caps, walking away from the camera. “They make time for each other, whenever possible,” it said.

I immediately called Michael.

“Have you seen the
Star
article with Emilia?”

“You aren't hung up on her, are you?”

“No. Did you read the article?”

“Why?”

“It says she and I are still together. It has pictures that aren't me saying it is.”

“Let me call you back.”

The cab was worming its way along Lexington when he called back. “Okay, so now I've seen it. Probably they had an old photo.”

“What?”

“They usually put these pieces together way in advance. Old interviews, old photos. Don't worry about it.”

“It's not me in the picture,” I yelled, and the cabbie shot me a glance. He had his own cell phone to his ear and I was a distraction.

“No shit?” Michael said. I could hear him flipping through a magazine. We were both looking at the same images. “Really, you're serious? Looks just like you.”

Almost immediately all of Mal's friends had turned to the press and sold their stories, even those who didn't have one. On the plane to LA I was surrounded by people reading another of the gossip rags. On the cover was an old photo of Mal with an inset of him being lifted from the river.
Life and death on the edge,
it said.

A female flight attendant recognized me and flirted with me throughout the flight. She made sure to get a copy of the magazine for me, offered it as if I had any interest in reading about the life and death of the friend I'd watched die, and when I took it and thanked her and put it into my jacket pocket I wondered what was wrong with me that I couldn't just tell her to leave me alone, to take the magazine away, to forget that she had seen me and that we had ever talked. We landed and I gave an autograph and phone number to her. It wasn't my number. I gave her Mal's old number.

I arrived at my hotel in LA and outside the window was an incredibly different view from the one from my hotel in New York City. A sprawl of low buildings led toward mountains in the distance. Other than that, the
room was identical to my hotel room in New York. Not the same color, and larger, laid out differently and full of natural light. Still, it was identical. Mail stacked on a bedside table, forwarded by Michael from New York. I assumed Michael had arranged things, considering the anal-retentive touches. The phone messages were stacked in chronological order and the mail sorted into four piles: junk, bills, personal, and miscellaneous. Miscellaneous was anything bigger than a letter. There were magazines, a set of glossy photos of more models for me to choose from for an upcoming photo shoot, and scripts in large manila envelopes.

I sat on a sofa that faced the windows. I pulled my jacket off and the magazine slipped to the floor. I bent and picked it up and, despite my disgust at it, opened it and flipped through to the pages about Mal's life. Photos purchased from the hangers-on and spectators mixed with professional images of the places that Mal had lived. The story even worked in his time in California: it referred to his car accident and had an image of the building where he'd stayed. I stopped flipping the pages and focused on the California images and text. I read back and forth through the pages to see if I could gather anything more than what little I knew. I couldn't. I had a photo of the place he'd lived in downtown Los Angeles, a warehouse turned apartment complex, crumbling arch entrance guarded by massive jade plants crawling from ignored planters on either side. I sat with the magazine in my lap until I heard my stomach growl. I looked up,
found the sun mostly set, the buildings visible from my window painted red, and the mountains beyond them glowing orange. My last meal had been airplane food more than eighteen hours earlier. What kind of fugue state had I fallen into? I rolled up the magazine, returned it to my jacket pocket, and headed to the door.

At the front desk I asked for directions to nearby restaurants. I was in Santa Monica, and they directed me to the Promenade. I walked the two blocks and found it, a wide street closed to vehicles, with large sculptured shrubs down the center. Fountains splattered nearby. Pedestrians wandered down the middle of the street, illuminated by the chain stores and restaurants on either side, and walking around the street performers formed small nucleic clusters every block or so.

I tried not to watch the performers, as they reminded me of Mal's and my struggles during our trip to New York. If we'd come to Los Angeles instead, we might have been among them even still, performing for quarters and the occasional bill from tourists coming out of Banana Republic. I went straight into a half-empty Tex-Mex joint and ordered a margarita and a burrito. Seated near the front, I watched street jugglers take turns throwing blades in the air. There were three of them, their routine tightly organized. One worked the crowd as the others passed whirling machetes back and forth with precise aim and well rehearsed ad-libs. I hadn't wanted to watch, but by the end of my burrito and third margarita I was transfixed by the blades and the banter. I paid my check
and gave the waiter an extra ten to call a cab for me. I then walked past the performers and dropped a couple of bills into their coffee can. The one working the crowd stopped in the middle of his spiel and looked at me. He raised a hand, as if to stop the others mid-act, as if to pull the blades from the air and draw his friends' attention to me instead of the dangerous routine they'd perfected. Before he could say anything I gave him another bill and said, “Do us all a favor and pretend you don't know who I am.”

His hand fell, as did his grin. He nodded and I waved goodnight as I headed to the corner to wait for my cab. I heard but didn't see the act resume behind me.

When the cab arrived I shoved the magazine toward the driver and showed him the picture of the complex Mal had been in.

“All I know is it's in downtown Los Angeles.” The elderly driver nodded and pressed the gas.

I spent seventy dollars on that cab. We drove for hours, up and down streets, most as terrible and vacant as the one before, and I lost the boost of my margaritas and slept for a time. For never having met the driver before, I trusted him deeply, and true to my trust, he woke me when he found the building.

“Hey, here it is.”

I pulled myself up from the seat and looked out a window.

“Other side.”

I turned and saw it was there, and it looked worse
than the picture had promised. The only thing healthy about it were the jade plants, which had turned to thriving bushes that stretched out and up as if intuiting there was a higher purpose they hadn't yet come to understand. I paid the cabbie and watched him make a quick U-turn to drive back the way he'd come. Only when he turned the corner did I think that I might need him to get back to the hotel.

The street echoed silence. Only a single car rolled toward me, and with the parking lot across the street and warehouses and high-rises nearby I was reminded of a vacant Manhattan.

I approached the arched entrance and stepped quickly out of concern for the cracks that ran across it. On the other side, seated on a bench in a wide entryway and drunk from a shared bottle wrapped in brown paper, conspired three men. Surprised to find them there, I stopped. Surprised to see me stop, they stared, not so much with hostility as with professional concern, professional in this case being drinking and possibly other mind-altering practices and whatever uninhibited viciousness those might accompany.

Just tired enough not to care what they might do to me, I walked up and said, “I'm looking for a guy. A street performer. Lived with someone here.” I held up the magazine as if it proved intent or identification, as if I was legitimate because someone in a magazine had once possibly lived in their building.

The tallest also had the worst skin, mottled and acne-scarred, and above his ravaged cheeks sat two pale eyes that looked me up and down. “You mean the guy who killed himself in New York?”

“Yes.”

“You a reporter?”

“No. A friend. I want to see where he lived while he was here.”

“Friend? Lots of his ‘friends' been coming by. They smell a lot like reporters.”

“Not me. I smell like a friend.”

The two smaller drinkers laughed at this and the taller stepped toward me. We stood in a circle of light from a too-dim lamp. He looked down on me and his eyes, not quite blue, squinted in what amounted to an ocular smile. “I'm sorry for your loss.”

I nodded. “Thank you.”

“Your friend lived with Bernie up in B-6. Tell him Chump sent you up. He'll talk to you.”

“Thanks, Chump.”

The tallest shook his head and thumbed toward the shortest of the three. “No, this one's Chump. I'm just the muscle.” They all laughed and I tried to as well. As I walked away he called after me again. “You know, you got a sick act.”

I counted a few empty thought balloons in my head. “I know.”

I walked along an uncertain path that suffered from
sporadic illumination, weaved back and forth between weeds growing from deep cracks, wandered often over stretches with no cement or wood flooring at all, dirt and sand grinding beneath me in the dark. At last I turned a corner and saw some stairs. I climbed them, despite not being certain of where they went other than up, and when I reached the top I found myself looking at a door that had the gold lettering
B-6
glued to it. I knocked and waited for Bernie to answer.

When Bernie finally opened the door I was surprised it hadn't taken longer. His hair and beard, one knottier than the other and sprinkled with bits of paper and cracker, all seemed to be growing leftward with such insistence that I thought not of someone having slept for too long on one side but of a plant left near a window to grow toward sunlight. Behind him radiated his apartment, illuminated by what might have been a thousand lamps of various designs, on the floor, tables, chairs, some on their sides, all burning bright, no lampshades, their heat rolling out from the open door and radiating across my face and head as it spilled up into the cooler evening air. He staggered and squinted. He smelled of moss and water. I wondered if he might not wither if taken into the dry darkness outside, if I might have caused him harm just by letting in a chill.