The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl (17 page)

Conversation Fluid

Denis had spent the past day trying to find a replacement coffeehouse, to fill the hole in his routine left when he’d been banned from Genius Loci. He’d tried Javha House, but there were actual
pigeons
roosting in the rafters there, which was too disgusting to contemplate, and he’d tried the Marigold Café, but the noise of a nearby jack-hammer had made concentration impossible. Now Whooping Coffee, the café of last resort, was also proving untenable. There was a primitive dance studio in the back of the building, full of mostly unattractive people contorting and leaping about ridiculously, presumably at least in part for the enjoyment of the café patrons, who seemed, by and large, fascinated by the goings-on. Denis could not, of course, work in such an environment, and being reminded of the primitive movement in
any
art form was enough to annoy him. He hated primitives; practitioners of such art were determined to recapture a nonexistent state of innocence, and in the pursuit of that spurious goal, they threw away everything a thousand generations of artists had learned about perspective, straight lines, linearity, self-referentiality, irony, postmodernism, all the artistic virtues that Denis held dear. Had he lived in the dimness of prehistory, he would not have been content with scratching pictures of elk and bison onto cave walls through some misplaced trust in sympathetic magic. Indeed, he would have been moved to do something not yet recognizable as art under those circumstances, like the formulation of mathematics and geometry, perhaps. He would not be at home among primitive, mud-streaked . . .

Denis put down his coffee cup with a gently shaking hand. He looked around the café, which was, naturally, decorated with primitive art, from ugly wooden masks to reproductions of cave paintings to “modern primitives,” the refuge of the artless would-be artist. There were pictures of women, those huge-breasted, wide-hipped, ant-headed über-mothers, and while none of them looked a bit like Jane, the association was there nevertheless. Jane had become something different, fundamentally—he’d known that, but now the nature of that change was more obvious to him. She was no longer capable of artifice. She had become a basic—a
direct
—creature. A modern primitive, violent, straightforward, mud-smeared.

Denis found it terrifying. Jane was now his very antithesis, and he had no idea where she was. Perhaps she was trying to break into Genius Loci now; perhaps she had gone to make love to a landslide; perhaps she was waiting in his apartment, having puzzled out the truth about what had happened to her, about what Denis had done, or failed to do. The old Jane, the Jane he’d dated, would have reacted in a certain way to improper actions on his part: She would have left, not talked to him for a while, stewed in her own juices, and become increasingly frustrated, all actions that didn’t interfere with Denis’s life in the slightest. But this new Jane . . . who knew what she might do? She wasn’t the woman he’d known. She was a monster, and there was no telling what action she might take next.

Denis found such unpredictability profoundly unsettling.

He rose from his chair and gathered his things, leaving the noise of thrumming drumbeats and bare feet slapping against the studio floor, walking out the door toward his car. What if he went home, and Jane was there? What then?

He had to get rid of her. It was as simple as that. Her very existence would weigh on his mind, make him paranoid, diminish his enjoyment of life. But how could he hurt her, when she was made of mud, when he’d killed her once already? Exorcisms and the like seemed absurd to Denis, but perhaps he should look into them. After all, ghost-animated mud-dolls seemed absurd, too. Getting rid of Jane,
really
rid of her, was the only way he could think to restore normalcy. And he would do whatever proved necessary to achieve that end. Without his routines, he would lose his mind, and in madness, his dreams of the machine that grinds would cease to be terrible, and would instead become a portent of some final solution.

“So what I want to do is get drunk,” Lindsay said, once she stopped crying—just sat up, wiped her eyes with her sleeves, and looked at Marzi earnestly, her eyes mascara-streaked. “Will you kindly be my enabler, barkeep?”

“Lindsay, sweets, are you sure you want to get wasted? How about we . . .” What? “Eat ice cream or something,” she said finally. “I guess we’re not culturally programmed with a lot of options, are we? We could talk about it, though.”

“Sweet lady liquor will loosen my tongue, Marzipan.” She sat back on the couch under the window, disappearing a little into its voluminous cushions, looking very small. “I just don’t want to think about it right now. I had this idea, this mental picture, of what the summer would be like, and Alice was a big part of that, bigger than I realized. I keep thinking about the way she’s gone, the hole that leaves in my understanding of things, it’s like hamster wheels spinning away in my brain . . . so I want to get drunk, and not think about it. Sometimes, if you repress enough, if you distract yourself enough, you can get so far ahead of the curve of grief that you never have to deal with it at all.”

“That’s a healthy attitude,” Marzi said.

“Fuck healthy,” Lindsay said softly. “Just be my friend, okay?”

Marzi nodded. “All right. But I’m going to make sure you drink lots of water, too.”

Lindsay took a twenty-dollar bill from her purse and handed it over. “Then beer me, dearie, and keep ’em coming until the money runs out. I have to go to the powder room.” Lindsay rose from the couch with none of her usual pixielike grace and walked through the Ocean Room to the tiny bathroom.

Marzi got up and drew a beer, wondering what had happened between Lindsay and Alice. There hadn’t been a lot of narrative sequence in Lindsay’s initial outpouring, just that Alice was leaving town on seriously short notice. It wasn’t as if they’d been involved for long—as far as Marzi knew, they’d only started flirting about three weeks ago—but with Lindsay, in this case, it was clearly more about missed chances and sudden disruptions than anything else. And maybe Lindsay had been prepared to give more of her heart than she usually did. Most people only got to enjoy the surface glitter of Lindsay’s personality, but Alice had touched something deeper in her, Alice with her quiet kindness, her true attention. Sure, it was hard for Lindsay. Sure, getting drunk wouldn’t ultimately help much. Sure, she would do it anyway.

“Hi, Marzi,” Jonathan said, appearing in the doorway, dressed all in black as usual. He looked as mournful, in his way, as Lindsay. “The pictures you took didn’t turn out. They’re overexposed.” He sat down in the ragged armchair beside the couch and put his feet up on the battered coffee table, right where the cowboy made of light had stood earlier. Marzi sat on one end of the couch, close enough for their knees to touch, almost.

Shit. All that effort for nothing. Well, not for
nothing
—she’d needed to go back into the Desert Room anyway, but . . . “Did I do something wrong? I knew that camera was too much for me.”

“No, it wasn’t you. The guy at the photo lab said it looked like the film had been exposed to the sun, but that doesn’t make sense. Even if it had been exposed, that would have ruined the whole roll. I’d taken a few pictures before I gave you the camera, and they all turned out fine.” He reached into his pocket and took out an envelope, fanning several photographs onto the table—pictures of beaches, peli-cans, seals, surfers, sunsets. “And there’s the picture I took of you, the last one on the roll.” Jonathan pulled that picture from beneath the others. Marzi thought she looked like a startled rabbit in the picture, but at least she didn’t have visible pimples or closed eyes. “It’s just the pictures you took for me in the Desert Room that didn’t come out. You can see it on the negative, they’re just
wiped
.”

“So it
is
my fault. I have the black thumb of photography.” That had to be it, right?

“No, I don’t think so. It’s some kind of equipment malfunction. You didn’t leave the lens cap on or anything—the
film
was ruined. I’m beginning to think the universe doesn’t want me to see this room.”

An equipment malfunction. Film that had never been shown to the sun, nevertheless exposed. Did it qualify as objective proof of the supernatural? The light-cowboy was flamboyant, sure, and pretty dramatic, but it was also wholly uncorroborated, and could have been nothing but an apparition from the depths of her diseased mind. That exposed film, though . . . that wasn’t just inside her head. That must mean something, right? What if the Outlaw, the thing behind the door—what if it was real? Then the Outlaw was the cause of her mental breakdown, not a symptom of it, and taking refuge in the notion of her own madness was just ducking her responsibility. Not at
all
what Rangergirl would do.

Jonathan sighed. “You know, meeting you aside, the past few days have royally sucked. Mud, fistfights, and frustration.” He rubbed his eyes. “I’m not sleeping well, either. I get insomnia a lot anyway, but it’s been especially bad lately. I don’t think I’m used to the Pigeonhole yet. The acoustics in there are really strange. I hear distant voices all night long, coming up from the street, I guess. But I’ve been so excited about the work, and the murals, that I didn’t mind. But now this happens, and I
still
can’t see all the murals.” He shook his head.

“It’s just one room, right?” Marzi said. “You’ve got the other murals; they’re good examples of Garamond Ray’s work. Isn’t that enough?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Sure. They have to be enough. I just hate that I’m so
close
to this other major work, and I can’t even
see
it. It gets to me.” He looked up at her. “I don’t suppose . . . Hendrix isn’t here, nobody’s here, nobody’d know if I went into the Desert Room and looked around, right? Could I?”

Marzi exhaled heavily. “Jonathan, please don’t put me in this position.” There was no way she’d let him go into that room, harmless as it had seemed while she was there. It was so
close
to bad things, it was thin ice, and who knew what might happen? She was the guardian, for whatever reason, like it or not, and she couldn’t let Jonathan in. She hadn’t even covered up the door again when she left, so it would be right there in plain sight. . . . “I stepped through a rotten board when I went in there this afternoon. I covered it up with an old piece of wood so Hendrix wouldn’t notice and flip out, but it’s just too dangerous. If you got hurt, and we had to call an ambulance . . . Hendrix already had to get out of bed to come here the other night because of Jane and Beej and Denis. I don’t want to wake him up again.”

Jonathan raised his hands. “Fine, sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.”

“Sure,” she said, a little stiffly, feeling bad about the lie, but what else could she do? “It’s okay. It must be driving you crazy.”

“You’ll have to give me a good description of the room, at least, so I have something, an eyewitness account. Maybe it’ll give the story a little drama—the lost room of Garamond Ray.”

I wish it were a “lost room,”
Marzi thought, and said, “Absolutely.”

Lindsay came out of the bathroom, makeup washed away from her eyes, lending her an oddly vulnerable look. She nodded to Jonathan. “Did you tell him?” she asked.

“No, babe. I figured you’d want to.”

Lindsay came over, dropped onto the couch, and addressed Jonathan. “I’ve been jilted by my lover. Well, maybe not jilted, maybe it’s worse because it’s not even really about me, I’m not that important, but anyway, she left. She had good reasons, and I’m being childish and unfair, but I don’t care, she
left,
and I’m sad, and I’m going to drink, drink, and keep on drinking. Will you comfort me?”

“Of course,” Jonathan said.

Lindsay smiled at Marzi. “You’re a comfort. You’re both comforts.”

“I’ll get a couple more beers,” Marzi said, because what else could she do? They would get each other through the night, in whatever way possible. If she told them she was the only thing standing between Santa Cruz and an otherworldly force of destruction, they’d call up the hospital and get her some help, with the best of intentions. She had to carry this herself. The Lone Ranger.

Marzi poured herself a beer.

Three hours and many pints of beer later, Marzi finally shut the front doors of the café and turned off the neon sign in the window. There had been no other customers, as if whatever effect had driven them out earlier still lingered, like the smoke from citronella candles keeping mosquitoes away. Lindsay and Jonathan were apparently immune, but they both had other things on their minds, after all. Marzi was the soberest of the three, if only because she’d felt some sense of duty to her job, and had limited herself to two beers. It wouldn’t be right to get sloshed when she was the only employee here. The three of them had talked about many things, distracting themselves from their troubles, and now they sat together on the floor, feet spread out before them, half-empty pints sitting between their legs.

“What it is, is women,” Lindsay said.

Jonathan raised his glass.

“I love women.” She looked at Jonathan, blinking. “I like boys, too. I do. I’m flexible. But women.” She gestured vaguely, perhaps making an hourglass shape in the air, perhaps intending something less obvious. “I love them. But they’re rough. I’m one, I don’t understand it. Confusing. How do you do it, huh? You, Jonathan, how?”

“You muddle through,” Jonathan said.

“Mmm,” Lindsay said meditatively, as if considering what he meant. “Alice, did I tell you why she left?”

“No, you didn’t say,” Marzi said.

“This place.” Lindsay gestured at the walls and the ceiling. “She said she wanted to burn it down.”

Marzi sat up straighter, and cleared her throat, and said, “Ah. Why did she want to do that?”

Lindsay corkscrewed her finger around her temple. “She said it was an
urge
. That she was turning into a pyromaniac. She didn’t want to be a pyro, so she left. Said it was easier to resist, when she was far away.”