BLACK DOLPHIN

A thesis submitted

To Kent State University in partial

Fulfillment of the requirements for the

Degree of Master of Arts

by

James David Bergsten

May, 2014

© Copyright

All rights reserved Thesis written by

James D. Bergsten

B.A., Miami University, 2010

Approved by

Imad Rahman, MFA, Advisor

Eric Wasserman, MFA, Committee Member

Robert Miltner, Ph.D., Committee Member

Robert Trogdon, Ph.D., Chair, Department of English

Raymond A. Craig, Ph.D., Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

TABLE OF CONTENTS………………………………………………………………………iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………………….iv

I. PART I……………………………………………………………………………….1

The Writer – Chapter I…………………………………………………………………….2

Black Dolphin – Chapter I: Vigo & Simone…………………………....………………..25

The Writer – Chapter II………………………………………..………..………………..70

Alexei………………………………………………………..…………..……………….81

The Writer – Chapter III……………………………………..…………..………………98

Black Dolphin – Chapter II: Alain & Lola……………..………………..……………..119

The Writer – Chapter IV……………………..……………………………..…………..155

II. PART II…………………………………………………………………………...158

iii

Acknowledgements:

To my mother & father,

You gave me life. Without you, I would be nothing.

To my best friend Damon,

Your support and friendship were invaluable to me. Thank you, my friend.

And to Em, my lover and companion,

You are the reason I still feel love in this horrible world of ours.

iv

1

Part I

– There is no such thing as real life.

2

The Writer

April, 2013. Akron, Ohio.

Manic pixie girls were verboten – in life and in fiction. He’d sworn himself off them.

They were aloof quirky disasters with bad personalities and even worse hang-ups. They seemed to thrive on making him miserable with love, his doubts and fear of abandonment a sweet, life- preserving nectar they needed to slurp up with blithe, forked tongues. He resolved at the start of the summer to stay away from them forever and to never, ever write about them again.

Besides the pixie girls, it was difficult to channel his daily experiences into his writing when his daily experiences only ran the gambit of microwaving egg-rolls and reading Guy

Debord or The Coming Insurrection in his squat, dank little studio apartment after work, waiting for the Fall semester to start.

In his apartment he fought a constant battle against mold. Crevices taunted him with musty smells and speckled growths. Mold clambered onto his shoes and up the walls. He clutched a spray bottle like a truncheon and a wet rag like a shield and tried not to breathe too deeply. The spores encroached on him at night. He turned on fans and ran his a/c to combat the humidity. The spinning dial of his electric meter whirred in the darkness.

In the morning, he would take the highway to work and the sun would be lolling above the city, burning fiery red in its long slog upward – casting light down, burning his eyes, illuminating the brittle corners of buildings and splaying the shadows of smokestacks. An incredible sense of feeling would fall over him – lost in that same instant with the pull of traffic.

Tiny ants were crushed under the weight of the day, scurrying from here to there. 3

Bowery and Lakeshore – dirty lake and soot-filled fish – the unfit milieu of morning traffic merged together. The morning sun humbled him. The commute? Cut off in his mind from the destination. It was the only time he felt completely free to have static thought – which eluded him anyway.

He wondered how many times he had passed by these same cars – these same people.

The chances were slim but he wondered all the same and felt sad because he would never know.

Death and danger were trusting strangers in expensive coffins-on-wheels. He let loose and drove to work.

4

*

The writer had been born near Syracuse, New York in 1988. His mother had cradled him in swaddled cloth. A picture in a photo album. He’d been born two weeks early and two weeks later his family moved to Ohio – his mother, father, and toddler sister.

In his memories of his early childhood, he distinctly remembered the sun and how it would shine – a shine that lost its luster in the inertia of years.

In two years’ time, a second sister was born.

Play sets and cable television. Nickelodeon and a Hewlett-Packard computer. Dial-up.

VHS tapes. A wooden toy box. A half-finished basement. A fridge full of food. A backyard with thick, green grass. Neighbor boys to play with. A school close by. Lessons from dad at the dinner table. Being cradled in his mother’s arms.

The first day of pre-school – he cried.

5

*

Women had always been somewhat baneful to his existence. His fondness for them, a bit of a paradox.

As a boy, he’d never believed in cooties. He was drawn to girls. Their presence sending jelly through his bones and warming his heart. But he was short for his age – the growth spurt would not come until Junior High – and this marked him for many years and girls paid him no mind. This rejection made his desire to be liked by girls all the more intense. Reciprocated love could demonstrate his worth – something everyone would see.

Years passed.

Hormones started to fill his body.

The girls were turning into women.

He still couldn’t talk to them.

High School.

And it happened.

His first girlfriend, S, had been four years his senior. S had long bleach-blonde hair, and had told him in the backseat of her car that his cock was big and that skinny guys like him always had big cocks. She added that there is such a thing as ‘too big’ and then jerked him off right there, parked in the driveway of her grandmother’s house. She took his virginity a month later when he was sixteen.

He sulked around for a year after she’d dumped him.

Later, in college, he fell in love with a short little red-haired art student with squirrel-ish cheeks and a can-do spirit – L. She made him bracelets out of found items or let him fuck her on the couch in her parent’s basement or they went to the movies and held hands. From canvas to 6 canvas, bed sheet to bed sheet, story to story – they found themselves inseparable. They went to parks and dipped their feet in cool water or went to the mall and made faces at all the wasted money. He told her he loved her more times than he could remember. They dropped acid a few times and felt gangly-weird kissing and fucking – laughing, crashing through daily life. No one could tell them anything that they didn’t already know. They felt invincible. He would write stories and she would make paintings and their work would collaborate and one would feed the other when they were starving and heal them when they were sick.

He didn’t know she was unhappy.

She ended it on a rainy afternoon over the phone, saying she wasn’t in love anymore – that he was not the one and that she was sorry. He didn’t beg or plead at first. Then he did a whole lot of both until, one day, he found himself in a doctor’s office being prescribed placebos and anti-depressants and a regimen of daily activity to take his mind off things. After L went mad – lost her mind and was diagnosed – the suicidal thoughts were, truth be told, nothing serious – just garden-variety self-loathing and run-of-the-mill psychosis. The fact that he had made through his first year at college seemed a miracle to him.

Then there were the Megan’s. Each in quick succession and each one’s name spelled differently.

Megan #1 had just broken up with her boyfriend and seemed to like the writer. They spent a few awkward dates on a couch, not having much to say, and not really saying anything until they’d started making out. He felt bad for reading Hoftstadter to her as much as he did for fucking her. She ended things not long after they began – full of guilt and relief. The writer felt much the same. 7

Meghan #2 told him she wouldn’t have sex, and he said ok and good riddance to sex altogether – happy to oblige. But, one night, she had pressed the weight of her body into him and moaned, and he reached down and ran his fingers through the warm folds of her thin gym shorts.

She sat up, ramrod straight, and glared at him. He apologized, said he didn’t mean to – that it wouldn’t happen again. He hadn’t understood. She started threatening that she would sleep on the floor if he was going to stay and left him in her dorm room in the dark as rain started to fall outside. He sat on the floor feeling like a fool for a nightmarish five minutes, cursing himself for not understanding where the line had been drawn, hoping she still liked him – that he hadn’t blown his chances to find a sliver of happiness.

The door creaked open again and he asked her if he should go and she said no. She called him to bed and jerked him off before they fell asleep and did it twice again in the morning, telling him to wear her bug-eyed sunglasses so she could watch herself when he came.

It lasted another week before she got bored and told him not to call anymore.

The writer met Meaghan #3 just before he started grad school. Her parents had a swimming pool and she could get really excellent weed from a chubby guy named Max, and sometimes she and her brother and the writer would have bonfires behind her house and play guitar and kick a soccer ball around and drink beer until the humidity forced them inside and into their rooms.

Once, when they were at dinner with Meaghan #3’s parents, she leaned over and whispered into his ear, “I’m not wearing any panties.” He started laughing as she squeezed his inner thigh tight in her hand. Her whispery touch thrilled him. He fucked her, less than an hour later, in her bedroom – two doors down from her parents, who were falling asleep in front of the digital glow of Time Warner Cable. 8

She ended things by telling him that she didn’t really like him as a person and not to come by anymore. She also stole his tattered copy of House of Leaves.

9

*

May, 2013. Akron, Ohio.

He was using a bench grinder to shave the paint off the bottom of a glass cologne bottle.

This was done to better facilitate the adhesion of the glue applied in the next step. He and his line had to finish 3,000 units in less than eight hours. It was all fumes and dust. His station boss, Ivan, gave him a breathing mask, and when the bottles were all ground down, he took over gluing the bottles to placards. Over and over and over and over again. Line them up, hit the peddle, splooge the glue, place it on the placard. Repeat. Sad, tragic, happy tracks.

A guy named Bobby, who had a steep forehead hanging over an ugly face, was telling everyone and no one in particular about his suspended driver’s license and how much he had drank the night before. He rambled about how black girls smelled weird to him and how he got hit with a hammer by his girlfriend’s uncle because he was caught naked with her in the back of his car in the driveway. The stories fell, listless in the mire – other men laughed and nodded for no reason. He kept talking about himself and didn’t stop except to laugh at his own jokes.

“I actually got fired from my old job for sexual harassment,” he said. “This old chick – she was like sixty or something – said I had been harassing her. Tell me, do I seem like the kind of guy who would harass some sixty year old lady?”

The writer couldn’t help thinking that Bobby looked exactly like the type of guy who would harass some sixty year old lady.

The glue had the same cloudy consistency of semen.

Thoughts died, shrouded in a misty haze, seldom wondering – what exactly was he doing here?

10

*

He’d seen her looking at him across the production floor.

There was a nervous hesitation in her gaze, a sort of looking back and forth which signified an honest curiosity.

She was cute.

There were three violet roses tattooed on her chest. She looked at him and they’d share a smile and then go back to work. He’d look at her and the scene would repeat.

One day, she ambushed him at the water fountain and said she liked his shirt. It was of a

Technicolor monkey-face splattered over purple-dyed cotton. She disappeared in the same instant; clutching her purse close to her body like a nerdy girl clutches her school books between class periods.

He said nothing, not knowing what to say, and having a mouth full of water.

The writer came home from work that evening and masturbated in front of his laptop like he always did. He garnered little pleasure from it, sighing as his penis became erect in his hand and he navigated the images and short videos of fellatio and other forms of human coupling.

At the height of it, he paused the porn and thought of his favorite ex-girlfriend, years ago, in his teenage-bedroom. Red hair, pale skin – gentle profusions of tender faded memories. When he came, the ejaculate landed in his left-hand palm and he looked at it as he tried to keep it from spilling anywhere. It was white and cloudy and liquid. The writer got up from his chair and grabbed a paper napkin to wipe himself off. He washed his hands and then started to make dinner in a frying pan.

He still felt like a teenager – a teenage wastrel – a ne’er-do-well that still distantly felt like a child. Innocent and free of guilt in one moment, ravaged and cursing himself in the next. 11

Tired. Beleagured. Assailed by everything all at once – a totality of pressure. Nothing felt real anymore – all motions and no substance now that he was a man.

It was nothing to talk about. Things like that made people cry or feel uncomfortable or flat-out dislike you. People who would roll their feelings up into dirty rags, forever left unfolded.

People who wondered to themselves why he was so quiet.

People were not for talking to.

The world seemed to be collapsing in on itself, becoming smaller and smaller until it would implode in a savage frenzy of reality-forgot. WWIII would break out in the Middle East or Eastern Europe. Water would be privatized. Tupperware was full of dioxins. God was definitely dead. Love was a snarky, absurd, bourgeois privilege.

His days were spent alone or spent working or spent online in anarchist discussion forums and reading foreign news. Time was punched in and out and thousands of widgets – non- stop production – hurt his fingers. He touched their fleshy tips against one another and tried to focus on the sensation against his skin, trying to distinguish between touching and being touched.

He felt broken – mostly because he was still broke, even with the job. Worst of all, he couldn’t write. Whenever he wrote, he wrote feeble reimaginings of his life, rambling absurdist short stories, or farcically mundane rehashings of Hollywood-esque noir. Absolutely no idea what he was doing. It jammed him up and halted the process altogether.

His life was boring. He could not write what he knew.

Wake up, drive, smoke, company property. Fuck. Marijuana dulled the pain but only made him hungry. Jobs came and went and he went back and forth. Time was on the clock. Time was frozen. Time was an ether that he passed through. His thoughts were always somewhere other than – elsewhere and barely within. He longed for the start of the Fall semester. 12

His food stamp papers were sitting on his nightstand. He was eligible for $16 a month but needed to fill out additional paperwork. The thought of going back down to the Department of

Jobs and Family Services for a lousy $16 only made him feel hungrier.

The blinds in his apartment were closed and a black blanket was draped over them. It blocked out all the light. He could hear the sharp wind whipping through the angles and corners outside – screaming in the silence, echoing in the day and night.

He watched cartoons from his childhood well past midnight, suppressing the weight of the past with large glasses of wine and wishing he had some idea of what he was doing.

13

*

At work the next day he put together boxes and unwrapped pre-packed flat rails that were wrapped in newspaper. The papers were full of obituaries. The dead faces stared at him as he crumpled them up and tossed them into the trash. He tried not to read the words – the ages of the deceased. White hair, frail folded skin. Death and forgotten lore. Split-second decisions and denials.

He hoped no one was watching him while he worked.

The warehouse was hot. His face was sticking shut when he took a breath and he couldn’t really breathe. Hours were watered down eternities. He listened to the music on his mp3 player and tried not to look at anyone too long.

A horrible oven that cooked people slowly, for over nine hours, and when they were just to the breaking point of bursting and spewing bile everywhere, they were let go into a frightening heat or a frightening storm for ten minutes at a time to smoke cigarettes or eat food from fast food restaurants and vending machines. It was a flurry of protracted human bones – running in ways they’d never meant to. The end of the day.

If you don’t understand, the writer wrote, no one does.

14

*

Management bought a crumb cake and set up a table during break and the production floor swarmed around it like a bunch of spoiled children. He was looking at her pick at a piece of the cake in the break room. She had a small chin and tiny nose, short black hair swept to the side.

The flowers on her chest peaked at him through the doily folds of her shirt’s neckline. Her eyes lifted. Bright lights reflected on the tile floor glared up at him. He looked back but she was no longer looking.

“Do you mind if I sit here?” a scrawny pair of hairy shoulders with a wire-frame pair of glasses asked him. The writer said, “I guess,” and the man sat down. “Is that breakfast, lunch, or dinner?” he asked.

The writer looked at him and said nothing. He turned back to the girl and watched her crumple up her napkin and walk out the door to the production floor.

“I’m pretty sick of all this wind,” the man said. “You know, if buildings were shaped like tuna cans, there’d be no wind resistance.”

The writer nodded, said nothing, stuffed the last large bite of his sandwich in his mouth and propelled himself back onto the production floor.

15

*

He had so much writer’s block within him that he felt heavy with it – like his blood was weighted down and viscous, his fingertips heavy and sluggish.

What was the point of saying anything unless you actually had something to say?

Rambling, incoherent didacticism. Bored, thirsty readers with dry eyeballs. It was easy to be nihilistic and white – both of which were bullshit. No one gives a shit about a twenty something semi-bohemian fucknut. Words came out of him like an unending gargle of disappointment and he would burn his manuscripts after writing them. This was his truth: writing was about fire. It was about burning someone when they turned the page. It was about scorching something into the tender flesh of the heart – not stupid, quirky garbage that deserved to be set on fire in the bathtub in the early hours of the morning.

16

*

She was standing by the lockers when he finally introduced himself.

“Hi,” he said – caution wafting – I’m a person with a name.

“Hi,” she raised her head, “I’m M.” She smiled – glorious sunrises and unfolding petals and other horrible clichés surged through him. “Sorry I’ve been staring at you so much. You look like someone I know,” she said.

He searched for a word, a couple of them, strung together – a sentence. “Oh. That’s alright. You work here long?” The words tasted like stale cola.

“About three weeks.” She set her purse on the floor beneath the coat rack.

“Same here.” Pause. “This your second job?”

“What?”

“Do you have another job besides this one?”

“Oh. No.”

Pause.

“I teach,” he said, “part time – at a University,” he said, “ – while I’m getting my degree.”

“Oh yeah? That’s cool. What’s your degree in? What do you teach?”

“Creative writing. I mean, I teach composition – to the incoming freshman,” he said. “But they don’t give me hours during the summer and I was all out of money. That’s why I’m here.”

The writer motioned to the warehouse around them.

“Yeah, I worked here once before when I was hard up for cash, but they fired all the temps at the end of the season,” she said. “I was in school for a while, but I had to take a break.

Money. You know.” She too motioned to the warehouse. 17

They walked together alongside the guard rail, following the blue line demarcated for their safety. The production floor was back from break and they could barely hear each other now.

He watched her fill an empty water bottle with an energy drink. It was brownish and frothy and the writer laughed, trying to think of how he could describe it later.

18

*

The internet was a constant distraction. A gigantic front page you could click and activate and probe. Anarchism in hyperlinks.

He was messaging a professor about his novel.

Words weren’t coming out right, he told him. Things were looking bleak. His novel was a tangle. A glacier carving through bedrock, leaving ugly, jagged streaks. It was supposed to be a jet-setting international action-noir thriller swirling with intrigue, but it felt laden with untamed characters and unkempt motivations. It needed a hook. An image. A theme.

Empty beer cans and roasted roached joints, a filigree of papers and dirty clothes piles – there was hardly anywhere to sit anymore. He imagined that his apartment looked like the inside of his mind.

Digging through an old box of writing, he found a list he’d written down years ago. It was entitled “Stale Media-Fuckery” – dozens of headlines stolen from news sites. It read:

“What does your desk say about you? Sick girl's story moved readers. Giving away free money - what's the catch? Suspect in carjacking wore a bikini. Girl abducted, killed while on errand. Decorate walls without painting (hanging your favorite plates is just one colorful idea).

Markers point to end of economic downturn (some analysts cast doubt). North Carolina Dad accused of leading a terrorist group. Tragedy at local animal shelter - cat owner 'horrified' by staff error. President asks moms to return to school. President asks moms to refinance. President weighs in on current events. President has policy opponents over for a beer - what will they be drinking? Bank robber confesses to priest - hands over cash. What 45% of women say about sex.

Your weekly horoscope. Stocks fall after ‘Housing, Earning, and Consumer Confidence’ data. 19

Trick to get an unsightly bed stain out of a sheet. Jury backs Hospital in Immigrant case. Blue

M&M's may reduce damage from spinal injuries. Man who murdered sis wanted parole.”

It meant nothing and his consciousness paraded over things with the same candor of a wooly mammoth. Stomp, flat, forgot. Everything meandered. He tried his danmdest, but his writing was all so many smoke trails wafting about, lost in the ether of time and half-thought forget-me-nots and wish fulfillment and time spent not writing.

He didn’t eat food all day and went to bed after a few beers when he got home. Sleep was evasive. The t.v. flickered and the a/c rattled. He was awake, prone, watching old movies on

Netflix – stale, brittle, pale-lit thoughts – hoping that he’d find the strength for something, anything beyond the idea of work. And then, like an innocuous little white bird, a masked- thought disguising itself in the tendril wanderings of his mind would come crashing in with “fuck you” and dredge up bad thoughts – jumbled and crumbling in him – reminding him of everything he’d tried to forget.

Pain and hunger haunting the world.

He’d grab his crotch like some kind of handle on a tilt-a-whirl, some kind of center-of- gravity, and hold on for dear life, hoping that everything could just dissipate for a few hours so he could have some peace and quiet and sleep.

He drifted off listening to the voices in his head talk gibberish which signified nothing.

20

*

The assembly line at work was cramming plastic widgets into boxes at finger-twisting speed. The Neanderthal named Bobby asked him,

“What do you think of that girl over in K-1?”

“You mean M?” the writer smiled.

“Yeah. You think she’s cute?”

The writer paused. “She’s really cute.”

“OK. I thought so too. I just wanted to get a second opinion before I made a move.”

“Bullshit,” the writer thought. Man-centric high school bullshit is what it was.

He couldn’t help but think that Bobby bore a striking physical resemblance to the rock- eater character from The Never Ending Story.

“I thought you were with that one girl,” the writer said.

“Nah,” Bobby replied. “I mean I was but, ya’ know, whatever.”

During break, the writer sat near where M usually sat. She walked in – eyes lowered – and Bobby called to her from across the room – beckoning to her because he had his second opinion. The writer watched her hesitate, languishing between ignoring the invitation and what it might mean to accept it, but she seated herself at the table by the writer and ignored Bobby’s cat- calls. The writer picked up the last bite his energy bar, walked to her table, seated himself across from her and smiled. She lilted a grin back to him and they sat like that until the ten minutes were up.

In the bathroom, Bobby approached the writer – his face a swirl of faux self-effacement.

“So, you talkin’ to that M girl?” He washed his hands, shaking them dry, not making eye contact. 21

“I’ve already been talking to her,” the writer said.

“That’s cool. She’s kind of weird.”

The writer frowned.

“Hm.”

“Yeah, so,” Bobby looked around, “she’s all yours man.”

The writer said nothing.

Wounded pride in a stupid man is always an ugly thing and Bobby was a very ugly person. The more the writer thought about it, the more he wanted to deviate Bobby’s septum, but he also didn’t want to get fired or drag M into some kind of drama.

After work, the writer gave M his number on a scrap piece of paper torn from a folder baring the insignia of his writing program. She smiled, said she’d message him later, hopped in her car, and gave him a wave. He waved back and then stumbled into his car.

22

*

The only thing about being a writer he didn’t like was the lying.

In order to get people to even read your thoughts, you had to trick them. You had to entertain them. You had to lie to them and give them a reason to keep reading. It made him feel cheap. Like an advertisement. And that made him feel sick. Sick with himself, with the world.

But the lies, he hoped, all amounted to some kind of truth – or its gross approximation – and meaning would start there. Only time would tell.

23

*

June, 2013. Akron, Ohio.

That night they met at her parent’s house. They were out of town, she’d said.

They were sitting in the solarium at her parent’s house around midnight, drinking semi- cold Red Stripes – another manic pixie girl ready to break his heart, he thought. But he found his heart more willing this time – willing to crash straight through the good stuff and get to the hurt and lessons learned simply for the sake of itself. For twenty five years women had spurned him.

Fractions of acceptance were all the tender scraps of love that he had. He went with what he knew – and that was to try to be happy – all else be damned. Now was not the time to cast doubt on this pretty girl, he thought, with her violet roses and moonlit face.

She didn’t cringe when he told her that he was a Communist. He didn’t flinch when she told him that for years she’d been bulimic. They might have even laughed about it – nervous as they were.

She snorted as she laughed and made awkward gestures with her hands as they talked and the night started to melt into itself, folding them up together until they were in her room with the lights off and their clothes on the floor, kissing and whispering things into each other’s ears under her bed sheets.

On M’s back was a tattoo of a black dolphin and the writer ran his fingers along its contours as M lay sleeping beside him.

24

*

The next day, the writer opened a word document on his computer and started typing the words, “Black Dolphin.”

25

Black Dolphin – Chapter I

Vigo & Simone

June, 1989. Paris, France.

Vigo Vegas sat on a little red velvet stool in a Parisian café. A decade had crept by from his perch atop stools – a forgotten forget-me-not of the 1970s Left, drinking mojitos and doing his best not to get them in his graying mustache. He was wearing a long beige trench coat and smoking Gauloises one after another.

A carnival was going on – a parade down the Champs-Éllysées. Filled with people and their merrymaking. There were a lot of colored lights swirling about and a din of whoops and orgiastic cries, people in masks, strangers grinding up against one another against the redbrick corners of alley ways.

A dark night falling on a city celebrating nothing.

Vigo thought of the film Charade. He’d seen it years ago in a theater in Barcelona.

Something about the carnival reminded him of the movie – something loose knit, convenient, and only slightly funny. Audrey Hepburn had looked great of course, but not even those long legs fit into the picture he was trying to paint. Why Charade? Why on this night? Sitting alone and thinking of bourgeois American cinema, drinking mojitos and feeling sorry for one’s self.

What was he still doing in Paris?

“Hey, Monsieur?” a little voice behind him said.

Vigo swiveled on the stool.

“Oui?” 26

It was a young man. Younger even, a boy – maybe only fourteen or fifteen – standing behind him. The boy was wearing dirty white sneakers and loose jeans, his head tucked inside the hood of a blue sweatshirt.

“There are some friends I have that want to talk to you,” the boy said.

“Friends? Get out of here kid.”

“I’m serious, Monsieur. They are not far away.”

“I’m sure they’re not.” Vigo laughed. “What do you want me to do, follow you down some alley so six or seven of your little friends can try to mug me? Go on now. I don’t want to meet your little friends.”

Vigo opened his jacket to show the Zamorana he had holstered under his arm.

The boys eyes went to the pistol and stayed there.

“They know who you are,” the boy said.

Vigo looked at him, trying to detect deceit writ large on his face.

“Who am I then?” he asked, not taking his eyes off the boy.

“You’re the Black Dolphin. Aren’t you?”

Vigo swiveled back to the bar.

“I was – once. Go away. I want to drink.”

“Here,” the boy said, pulling a piece of paper from his pocket. “Call this number. My friends have a job for you. At the very least, they want to speak with you. Call them if you want to set up a meeting. They said you wouldn’t come along.”

Vigo turned again to tell the boy to leave, but he was already gone – dissipated into the harangue of passerby’s. 27

He finished his drink and put the number in his coat pocket and started to walk down the

Rue de la Paix, the store fronts awash in the flashing lights of the parade. Drunk lovers ambled down the causeway next to him. Music rained above their heads. There was a sense of reeling back and time slowing down.

Vigo kept his hand on his gun and watched the reflections of those walking behind him, looking for repetitions and familiar faces.

None were there.

When he reached his hotel room, he pulled out his suitcase from underneath the bed and opened it. There were several cell phones individually sealed in paper bags. He grabbed one and tore through the paper.

He sat on his bed and stared at the Paris phone number he’d been given.

Dial the number. Make the call. Set up the meeting. Smash the phone.

If it sounded too risky, he would hang up on the spot.

“Oui?”

“Who is this?” Vigo asked.

“Ah, le Dauphin Noir,” the voice said. “I have been expecting your call.”

“Who is this?” Vigo asked again.

“Do not worry, we are friends. You have nothing to fear from us.”

“I’ve heard that before. What do you want?”

“We want your help. Come, meet us at this address on the Rue St. Denis.”

The line went dead and a street address came through in a text message. 28

The Rue St. Denis was full of junkies and hookers loitering outside the sex shops and cafés. What was once the rue de Franciade and the site of the June Rebellion was now home to a lethargic mix of addicts, their pimps, and their dealers.

Vigo walked at the edge of the curb and ignored the women as they sang out to him.

Something he’d learned as a young man traveling through Bonne had been not to trust hookers and never let them get close to you on the street. They’d slash your face with a stiletto and take your wallet, your passport, your keys, and your lighter in a heartbeat. He’d seen it happen more than once.

He found the address, a paper thin two story house wedged in between two large apartment complexes. Vigo walked up the ancient creaking stairs and knocked on the hulking door.

The hallway smelled like dust and aging wood.

He heard shuffling inside the apartment.

The boy from the carnival answered.

“It’s him,” he said, shutting it and unchaining the lock.

“Monsieur Dauphin,” an androgynous voice said, “come in.”

Vigo entered, bristling past the muntin and closing the door behind him.

Inside were thirteen persons, all dressed in the same civilian uniform of white sneakers, jeans, and blue hoodies. Seven of them were standing, facing him. Two held cans of red and black spray-paint in their hands. Others wore red bandanas obscuring their faces. Their hands were in their pockets and their hoods were up. He could not tell who was a man or woman, their uniformity obscuring their features.

“I’m here,” he said. “Now, what is this job you have for me?” 29

He rested his hand on his Zamorana inside his coat.

“Paris is going to burn one day,” one of them said. “That much is sure. But even then, it will be rebuilt. It is already too late to try to save humanity. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. To go on waiting is madness.”

“Get to the point,” Vigo said. “I’m aware of all this. I was aware of all this when you were still suckling at your mother’s teat. Who do you think you’re talking to?”

“We’re well aware of who you are and the things you’ve done. You were a man of action once.”

“I am a revolutionary,” Vigo said.

“Yes, and that is why we asked you to come here.” The speaker paused. “Have you heard of the Beauchamp Aviation Empire?”

Vigo nodded.

“Then you know of Arnaud Beauchamp? He owns the principle airline for France. He owns an airport in Naples, Hamburg, and several other interests in Europe, as well as several interests in Israel. He is the steward of a majority of the commercial air traffic for France, and by proxy, the continent.”

“Do you want me to kill him?”

The morose little group laughed.

“No,” the speaker said, “we want you to kidnap his daughter.”

“His daughter? I don’t take jobs with children.”

“She is a young woman,” the speaker motioned to one of the group and they approached

Vigo with a picture. It showed a young, blonde haired woman in a strapless white gown, intricate lace at the hem and a smile on her face that looked like it was set in stone. 30

“And why her?” Vigo asked.

“Because she is Arnaud’s. It sends a message.”

“And what is your message?”

“The headline.”

“The headline?”

“It is the propaganda of the deed, with as little blood shed as possible. It is Simone that we offer you.”

“What do I get out of this?”

“We’ll give you five thousand dollars for expenses. Another ten will be wired to an account of your choosing after the kidnapping. We also give you full authority to execute this mission as you see fit. It will be a beautiful statement.”

“Fifteen thousand? That’s a pittance. And what statement?”

“Of an alternative. Don’t worry about the message. That is ours. Yours is only the means.

Do whatever you like with Beauchamp. Let her go. Kill her. Do as you see fit. We will make the message clear to Arnaud.”

Vigo ran a hand over his face.

“What message are you trying to send? Tell me now or I’m leaving.”

The speaker paused.

“When we were children,” they said, “we thought the world was something we would conquer. Then, in their public schools, we were taught that the world had been conquered and there was nothing left to learn. Our very belief in ‘the world’ meant it was conquered. We have reached the end of history. The Wall will come down. Ten million people, more than that, will go hungry. 31

“The message is that no one is exempt from justice. Death, pain, suffering – these things befall us all. We live in a society of means and those without the means are left to fester. The cracks in the system, the holes in the net – those are a symptom of a disease. Kidnapping Simone will not cure the disease but it will call attention to the symptoms. It will force the privileged to acknowledge their privilege and it will be your coup de grâce.”

Vigo looked at them.

“You are anarchists? Are you not?”

“We are comrades,” the speaker said.

“Hmm,” Vigo muttered. “I am considering your offer.”

32

*

August, 1989. Toulouse, France.

Simone practiced her backhand.

She saw Arnaud walking onto the court with his security detail, the chateau looming behind him – echoing the strokes of her racket.

“I’m off to Istanbul,” he said.

Simone served.

“What are you going to do while I’m gone?”

Simone leapt for the ball and swatted it back.

“I may go to Nice and read by the pool,” she said.

“Very good,” her father said. “I suppose you’ll be wanting some money then.”

“No,” she said, “I have my own.”

She sent the ball back across the court.

“Very good,” Arnaud said. “Well, then, if there’s nothing left, I’ll see you when I return.”

Arnaud turned and motioned to his guards to move back into the house.

Simone smacked the ball and sent her tennis coach diving, hitting the ground hard on his side. He looked at Simone, angry and shamed.

The last point ended the round and Simone walked back inside the house to shower.

In her room, she picked up a copy of My Life, by Leon Trotsky, and opened to a random page.

“The spiritual atmosphere which surrounded my early years and that in which I passed my later, conscious life are two different worlds, divided not only in time and space by decades and by far countries, but by the mountain chains of great events and by those inner landslides which are less obvious but are fully as important to one’s individuality. When I first began to 33 draft these memoirs, it often seemed to me as if I were not writing of my own childhood but of a long-past journey into a distant land. I even attempted to write my story in the third person, but this conventional form all too easily smacks of fiction, which is something that I should want to avoid at all costs.”

Simone closed the book.

She would go to Nice and read more by the beach and decide what to do with her life.

The water was drawn in the bathtub. She added aromatic soaps and lit some candles.

She slid into the water.

She would leave and figure out what to do with her life – laying by the beach and reading

Trotsky and forgetting about everything else. The crease, the fold, the ink, and the pages.

Certainty in a life actually lived. A revolution actually fought.

Of all the Bolsheviks, Trotsky was her favorite.

Permanent revolution, she liked that.

As she lay in the tub, she thought of running away. Doing good. Whatever that meant.

Breaking the confines. Tired – tired of ease. Lost, broken, wandering thoughts – trapped in bulwark solitude.

Simone wrapped a towel around her body and returned to her room. She lit a candelabra and put on a negligée. It was light pink, so light it was almost white. A gift from someone or other.

Sunlight was streaming in through the balcony windows, making the sanguine wallpaper of her room hum with a dull light. Simone looked about her and sighed. She called the maid and asked her to pack her things for a trip to Nice.

Simone went to the arboretum. She walked past the topiary and tried to calm down.

Every once in a while she would remember that people were starving in the world and it would 34 make her feel sick. No time. No way to change things. Powerless. But the trees made her feel welcome and alive and with a peculiar sense of nature – shaped and planted as they were by the hands of men.

The trip to Nice was boring and uneventful, which it made insufferable to Simone. Every plane ride in history distilled into flutes of champagne and shrimp cocktail, enough to drive you mad. Enough to remind you that people survived on money, never an object to Simone.

Several other first class passengers asked her for an autograph – her body guards looking on. She signed them and thanked the people.

“You’re such a delight,” they would say.

“You’re too kind,” she would say.

It made her head hurt and she did not like it.

Nice is a nice place, Simone thought. The sea. The sun.

When she arrived in Nice, she went out to buy a bottle of perfume. The avenues and boulevards were slick with rain. She had her driver pull to the curb in front of a little boutique.

“Hello,” she said to the young clerk. “What is your name?”

“Ramon,” he said. “Good evening, Madame.”

“Madame? Ramon, find me a perfume. Pick one you think I will like.”

“What is your name?” he asked. “I must first know your name to know what scent to look for.”

“Simone,” she said. “Now hurry up and find one. I’m not a patient customer.”

Ramon placed a pale white bottle before her.

She dabbed her wrist.

“No,” she said. “Try again.” 35

Ramon grabbed a celadon bottle and set it in front of Simone.

She smelled another drop.

“One more chance, Ramon,” she said.

Ramon searched among the bottles on the rack, turning suddenly to the display case, selecting a bottle of light blue and placing it before her.

“This,” he said.

Simone offered her wrist.

Ramone sprayed a fine mist over her skin.

Simone breathed in and smiled.

“Do you have a changing room?” she asked.

36

*

August, 1989. Los Angeles, California.

Vigo undid the brass latches on the satchel and pulled the Kedr PP-91 submachine gun out in pieces. He laid the skeleton of the gun on the hotel bed and watched the street out the balcony window, drumming his fingers on his paunchy belly.

The TV was leaking news stories across the room.

He stepped back from the window and began cleaning each part of the gun piece by piece. He used the towels from the bathroom to wipe away the excess lubricant. Once the towels were stained black, he placed them in the satchel with the Kedr to keep the parts from rattling.

He went to the minibar and took a few of the miniature bottles of whiskey and vodka and poured them into two different glasses.

The room quaked with bourgeois privilege – paisley, pastel-colored wallpaper, lacquered furniture, faux gas lamps running on electric current.

L.A. honked and howled outside the window.

He took two shots of whiskey and then started sipping on the vodka - switched the TV to a different American news channel. There was a dark-haired 30-something talking-head on the screen prattling about the Middle East.

“Pigs,” he spat. He laid back on the bed and stretched his limbs.

An image of Simone Beauchamp flashed on the screen, an ad for L’Oreal. She was smiling and her hair was cascading around her head with volume and shine but her eyes looked past everything and it unsettled him. 37

His Zamorana was on the nightstand. He picked it up and checked the chamber to make sure it was loaded and then placed the pistol under his pillow, put on his sunglasses, and nodded off to sleep in the pale light of the American newscast.

38

*

October, 1989. Nice, France.

The pool by the sea was bright blue and Simone went to sunbathe topless by the shore and read My Life by Leon Trotsky.

The estate in Nice was built into the cliff side and it met the rocky shore in a series of descending, squat, white rectangles – huge panes of glass and concrete steps.

Simone laid the towel down on the patio and watched the sun loll across the sky. There was a slow breeze – smooth and salty and fresh. The outlook overlooked the beach. A sea-arch stretched out into the deep waters – blue-black waters she never dared swim out to. She always swam in the pool, if she swam at all. The salt water hurt her eyes and she felt like it was bad for her hair. There were also jellyfish and man-o-war’s in the sea, and the salt and sand made her feel grimy, which she did not like. So, she put up with the chlorine in the pool and sunbathed on the outlook.

She opened the book and read:

“Our times again are rich in memoirs, perhaps richer than ever before. It is because there is much to tell. The more dramatic and rich in change the epoch, the more intense the interest in current history. The art of landscape-painting could never have been born in the Sahara. The ‘crossing’ of two epochs, as at present, gives rise to a desire to look back at yesterday, already far away, through the eyes of its active participants. That is the reason for the enormous growth in the literature of reminiscence since the days of the last war. Perhaps it will justify the present volume as well.”

A seagull landed on the rocky outcrop by the concrete. Simone looked at it and it looked at her.

“Dialectics,” she squawked. 39

The bird started and jumped up into the air. She watched it fly away, its wings heady in the wind and its outline dissolving into the sun.

She closed her eyes and thought of Trotsky. What he looked like. What kind of man he was. What it must have felt like to be killed with an ice axe.

There was a movie premier she’d been invited to attend tomorrow night in L.A. and she was being sponsored by L’Oreal. The film was called, Life is a Dream. She pressed her fingers to her temples and closed her eyes, trying to recall the last time she’d ever felt alive.

Simone had flown to every major city in Western Europe by the time she was ten and had never seen so much as seen a single poor person. Her father saw to it. She was provided for and safely locked away in hotel rooms when he was away on business – which was often. He hired child actresses to be her friends.

Marie and Molly were her favorites.

She never saw them past the age of thirteen.

They were twins and would wear matching dresses of complimentary colors. They ate dinners of the finest quality every night in different countries. Simone spoke five languages and she lost her virginity to a hotel bellboy in Lisbon when she was fifteen and never saw him again.

She laid back on the concrete and rested Trotsky’s book over her face, burying her nose in the crease. She fantasized about interrupting the movie premier in protest – screaming through a megaphone and shaking her fist, taking the projectionist hostage – wearing a partisan-red bandana over her face. She heard herself shouting, but she couldn’t quite make out the words.

40

*

The next evening Vigo tied his tie and put the Zamorana in his shoulder holster. He pulled on his suit jacket and ran some water from the faucet over his face and dried himself with a purple hand towel.

The sky was clear outside and dusk was falling.

He picked up the satchel with the fully assembled Kedr PP-91 in it and checked out of the hotel and left through the front entrance.

The overhead fluorescent lights in the parking garage ran across the car’s black finish and

Vigo could see himself in the thin reflection. He ran his fingers across his graying mustache and got in, placing the satchel on the passenger seat and pulling the Zamorana’s silencer out of the glovebox. He wound the silencer into the Zamorana and pulled the Kedr PP-91 out of the satchel and placed the two guns next to each other on the seat and looked at them.

He drove to the airport and parked on a side-street and lit a cigarette.

Words were a torpor, so he thought in feeling.

Each passerby, each mannerism, each tilt of the hat or slight of glance, he felt them all – one thousand times, radiating out from him, a projection of his training. A million tendrils slithered through the milieu and saw everything at once.

His ulcer was acting up. Heartburn. Ruminations of an unhealthy diet. He wet his lips and looked for anyone holding a sign saying “Beauchamp.”

No discretion was required. Vigo would minimize casualties, acquire the target, contact the L.A. Times and read a statement supplied by the contact.

He checked his watch.

Ten minutes. 41

Vigo shut off the car and got out with the satchel.

He walked toward a small grassy hill to glass the main thoroughfare with his binoculars and find the limo. It was parked and running outside the main terminal. A squat, bird-faced little man with a chauffeurs cap stood next to it holding a sign that said, “B E A U C H A M P.” Two large men in suits were standing next to him. Sunglasses and ear pieces. Broad shoulders and dour clean shaven faces.

He jogged back to the car but started to cough. It rattled through his breath. It made him stop and rest his head against the wheel, expectorating. No time.

Seconds later he was pulling up to the terminal. He parked seven or eight meters behind the limo and removed the Kedr from the satchel.

He watched Beauchamp exit through the sliding doors and look around.

She looked bored.

Her hands were clutching her passport, arms bent at the elbow. Some word appeared to leave her lips.

Vigo realized she’d spotted her ride. He waited until just before she shook the limo drivers hand to launch forward, his engine roaring. When he passed them, he turned the wheel hard, jumped the curb, and blocked the limo in. The two guards had their hands inside their jackets. He switched the safety off the Kedr and stepped out of the car, firing it into the air and then at the two men – who fell with their weapons still holstered.

The throng surrounding them screamed, dove to the ground, clutched their ears.

He pointed the gun at Beauchamp and told her to get into the car. She didn’t move a muscle, just stared at him blithely. She wasn’t as terrified as Vigo expected. He fired the gun in the air once more and grabbed her by the arm and threw her toward the car. 42

The limo driver stepped toward and went for the Kedr.

Vigo let go of Beauchamp to force the man back. He pointed the Kedr downward and it went off into the man’s chest. He crumpled to the ground and Vigo turned his back. 43

*

Simone seated herself in the rear passenger seat of the assassin’s car and stared up at the black eye of a security camera glaring down at them.

“It wasn’t very wise to kidnap me in the airport,” she said as he shut his door. He glared back at her. “They know your face.” She motioned toward the camera. “They saw you murder my driver and my guards.”

“I didn’t kill him. He’ll live.” The assassin put the car in reverse. “The guards I’m not so sure/” His accent was opaque.

Venzuelan? Simone wondered.

“And they already know my face,” he said. “They’ve been hunting me for years. I’m the

Black Dolphin – le Dauphin Noir, el Delfín Negro, чрн лфн.”

The car sped down the thoroughfare, streaking past the dissipating city.

Simone wondered what Trotsky might say at a time like this.

Two days ago she’d been shopping in Nice for perfume. The sales clerk had been a young man named Ramon. His face was smooth and his eyes were clear and full of nervous hope. She’d touched the vials he’d placed before her with the lightest of touches, dabbed fragrance on her wrists, and then made love to him in a stall in the woman’s changing room.

After he came, she told him “Merci” and left the shop without paying for anything.

The city was behind them and Simone had said nothing else to her captor. The car climbed high into the California night.

She pictured what her father would say when he learned of her fate. He’d be sitting in an ornate mahogany chair behind his ornate mahogany desk, wearing a blue suit, reading something, probably a newspaper, and someone would walk in – a woman in heels – and a cop 44 would be with her, and she would tell Arnaud that “Simone has been kidnapped,” and he would pause and look up at her and then at the police officer and then set the paper down and get on the phone with the Paris chief of police or some former members of the DST, whoever owed him the biggest favor, and he’d begin tracking her down without the intent of paying any ransom, for one does not negotiate with terrorists.

45

*

September, 1989. Big Sur, California.

Vigo lit Simone’s cigarette for her. He looked past the flame and into her eyes. They shimmered.

“Do you know what Mao said about revolution?”

“Tell me,” Simone said.

“It’s not a dinner party.”

Vigo walked to the table and sat with Simone.

“When did you discover the revolution?” he asked her.

The smoke wafted past their full faces.

“I was sixteen when I met a communist in Rome. His name was Fernando. I saw him in a crowded palazzo trying to rally the workers. He was young and filthy and dark skinned and I approached him and told him I loved his words in a broken Italian. He told me about the struggle and the coming insurrection. I made love to him in an alley behind a restaurant and he gave me a pamphlet.”

“You used him,” Vigo said.

“I ate his head. Ideas and all.”

The candles on the mantle had burned themselves low.

The air was beset with fragrance.

“You’re a hungry little thing, aren’t you?” Vigo said. He ashed his cigarette and peered at her with eyes cock-eyed and wanton.

“I’ve never known what it’s like to starve,” Simone said. She looked away. “But – yes,

I’m always hungry now.” 46

She touched his thigh.

Vigo thought about putting his cigarette out and kissing her.

He stood up and said,

“When I was a boy, I did not go hungry often. My father was a doctor. We were a family on the cusp of stability, and stable we were. My father’s finances allowed us a semblance of freedom – but we went hungry when the patients were hungry. He became a bitter man in his later years.”

“Bitter fathers are my area of expertise,” Simone said. “I’m sure mine is searching for me right now – acting the part. But I know what he’s thinking. He’s thinking that I’m a fool.”

Vigo paused and stroked his gray mustache.

“Simone,” he said, “I do not think you’re a fool. We are all a product of our privileges and our pasts.” He walked to the window and looked outside. “I’m very glad I took this mission.”

“Do you think we’ll be here much longer?” Simone asked.

“I think we could be here forever,” Vigo said. He picked up his glass of chardonnay and finished it in one smooth motion. “We can’t go back. Either of us. We are trapped in this world.”

“How much am I worth?” Simone asked.

“Not nearly enough,” Vigo said. “Not even close.”

47

*

Simone felt a flame flicker through her body. A tendril extension of her words.

“Tell me about your childhood,” Simone said.

The Black Dolphin tilted his head and obliged her.

“I was born in Medellin,” he said. “My father was, like I said, a doctor. His office was in our building. Sometimes he took his patients in our home. He was a busy man.

“My mother raised me and my seven sisters. I was the eldest and I had the most responsibility. My early years were there in Medellin. Books filled our shelves and foreign films graced our screens. We left the country at the beginning of La Violencia, in the early fifties. I saw the severed head of a man on a pike walking home from school one day.”

Vigo paused.

“I really grew up in Europe – in Vienna – and I went to University in Paris and Hamburg.

After I became revolutionary, I moved to Moscow to study Marxism. I hold a degree from the

University of Moscow in Marxism-Leninism, with various accredations from the former Soviet

Union.”

“I said tell me about your childhood,” Simone said. “Tell me a memory. Tell me about the head on a pike.”

The Black Dolphin paused, placing his glass of wine back on the table.

“You’re a firecracker, aren’t you?”

“Please, I want to know.”

The Black Dolphin smiled. 48

“I have nothing to say about that head. It was death. It scared me then because I didn’t know what it was. But seeing it – face to face – you never forget that. The eyes. Cold and dead.

But let me tell you a story,” he said.

“Please,” Simone said, waving her hand.

“When I was a young man in Vienna, I took a trip to Palermo with two friends – two friends with whom I thought I would be friends with for the rest of my life. Their names were

Antonio and Darek. One was the son of a fish monger and the other the bastard son of a needlework woman. They were the brightest men I have ever met – no hint of political theory in their bones. They were practical men seeking love and sex and soup. My heart breaks inwards for them – and the fact that I lost them to time.” The Black Dolphin paused. “Anyway, we went to Palermo when I was about seventeen. I was still a virgin. We were all deathly afraid of women.”

“So, why did you go to Palermo?” Simone asked.

The Black Dolphin looked at her, half his face lifting. He said,

“For women, of course. But this memory is not about that.”

“What happened?” she asked.

“We were sitting by the sea, on a concrete ledge overlooking a wharf and the silence of the water, drinking beer and feeling sore. The moon was hanging above us. There was something about its size – it’s lumonisity. It reminded me somehow that I was fleeting. That I would die.

That we all would die. That Antonio and Darek would die. That we were made of water and meat and moments – that our souls were awash in money and hunger. I felt this upsurge of camaraderie – this feeling of immense power in our friendship. The moon was big and glorious looking. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. We sat in silence, drinking bottles of beer and smoking 49 cigarettes and wishing ourselves into a better world.” The Black Dolphin paused again. “One of my greatest regrets was losing them. Time and circumstance took them from me.”

Simone lifted her gaze to meet him – let her face flow into his. “I’m sorry,” she said.

The Black Dolphin raised his hand.

“It is okay,” he said. “What of your childhood? What of your life unto this moment?”

Simone smiled.

“It was a privileged one. Something I would like to forget.”

“Come now,” The Black Dolphin whispered. “Many great revolutionaries came from privilege. And you must have something you wish to share with your captor.”

Simone laughed.

She said, blushing and shifting in her seat,

“I was the daughter of an aviation baron. When I was growing up, I was whisked from city to city in learjets – the price of which could feed thousands. And once, when I was in

Barcelona, I went out onto the balcony of my hotel suite – I must have been eight or nine – and I looked out over the city and I got this tremendous sense of buildings, you know? Thousands of them, towering over the city like so many concrete phalluses, and I thought to myself how absurd it is – life – modern life – living in this world of money and superstition.”

“Like you were lost in a world of souffrance.”

“Yes. Exactly,” Simone said. “A world I’d never chosen and would never choose.”

“The hunger of others bothers you, doesn’t it?” The Black Dolphin asked, lighting a cigarette.

“I-” Simone started. “There were banquets that my father took me to. So much food. If no one ate it, a servant would take the tray away.” Simone smirked. “I asked my father once, 50

‘Where do the servants take the food?’ and he said, ‘Why, Simone, they throw it away,’ as if this was something I should have known.” Simone looked at the Black Dolphin. “It has to stop,” she told him. “That’s what no one wants to admit. What no one wants to talk about. We repress all that waste and rubbish and poison that we put in the earth, in our bodies, in our minds. We repress how no one likes likes anyone else. Have you seen the people walking around in the city?

They don’t look happy. Eventually, it has got to stop.”

The Black Dolphin stood up and walked toward Simone.

“You’re a smart young woman,” he said and kissed her.

She put his hands on her face and looked up at him with blue eyes, alight and shimmery.

“Mademoiselle Beauchamp.”

“Yes,” she said.

“I feel like I’m going a bit mad.”

Simone smiled.

“Good,” she said. “That is the proper way to feel.”

51

*

Vigo was cleaning a cut on his hand while Simone sat in the chair in the corner of the cabin. Her hands were tied behind her back and she was staring at him with wide eyes.

“Look, Mademoiselle Beauchamp-” he began.

“Simone,” she said.

He started again, his voice sharp and tart,

“Simone, I do not like how you are looking at me. If you do not stop, I will put the blindfold on you.”

“Who is paying you? Is it the Palestinians?” she asked.

“No.”

“I suppose you want money.”

He pulled out his gun and pointed it at her breast.

“I am a revolutionary. You ask unimportant questions. This is not about compensation.

Do you hear me? I will kill you if I have to, haute bourgeois.”

“I am not an idiot,” she said, sticking out her chin. “I know how ransom works.”

He fired the gun next to her ear, shooting into the log-cabin wall behind her. Black flashes and sound-shocks echoed around in her head and she opened her jaw and reeled slightly.

“Next time I will kill you,” Vigo said, hitting the safety and putting the gun in the waistband of his pleated black pants.

He took the blindfold and the gag and put them on Simone and then started to make dinner. Portabello mushroom caps, seasoned with a little salt and butter, topped with Roma tomato halves, fried tofu, goat cheese, oregano. Lean pork shoulders, fried in a pan, splashed with a little five year old merlot, speckled slightly with fresh ground black pepper. 52

“It smells delicious,” Simone said through the gag. “But I’m a vegetarian.”

“You will eat what I make and you will like it,” Vigo said, sliding the cooking shoulders around with a flick of his wrist. The scent filled his nose and he breathed it in and thought of his dead mother, cooking at home when he was a boy.

“You should not welcome the change that is coming, Mademoiselle Beauchamp. You are the likes of the forgetful past.”

She laughed.

“And you are a dinosaur-relic of the Cold War.”

Vigo watched the oil pop and bubble in the pan.

Then he laughed.

53

*

Simone laughed too.

He was undeniably attractive, although he wasn’t what she would picture when she pictured an assassin-kidnapper. Simone had accepted the blindfold but resisted the gag and, growing tired, the Black Dolphin acquiesced.

“You are not allowed to talk unless I tell you you can talk,” the Black Dolphin said.

“I have been reading My Life, by Leon Trotsky.”

Silence.

“Quote me something then,” he said.

“Quote you something?”

“Yes, quote me something.”

She thought for a moment. The seagull – flying up – memoirs – rich in history. The shore rippling.

The Black Dolphin said,

“Chapter 1: Yanovka. Childhood is looked upon as the happiest time of life. Is that always true? No, only a few have a happy childhood. The idealization of childhood originated in the old literature of the privileged. A secure, affluent, and unclouded childhood, spent in a home of inherited wealth and culture, a childhood of affection and play, brings back to one memories of a sunny meadow at the beginning of the road of life. The grandees of literature, or the plebeians who glorify the grandees, have canonized this purely aristocratic view of childhood. But the majority of the people, if it looks back at all, sees, on the contrary, a childhood of darkness, hunger and dependence. Life strikes the weak – and who is weaker than a child?”

“That is impressive,” Simone said, biting her lip.

“What is impressive is your cognitive dissonance. Your father has enough money to feed millions.” 54

“And yet he lets them starve. Why do you think that is?” she laughed.

The Black Dolphin looked at her and frowned.

“You can go hungry tonight,” he said.

He hewed a pork shoulder in half and ate it in a single bite.

Days passed.

The Black Dolphin was in the kitchen, smoking and reading the newspaper, and Simone sat watching him from across the room. She’d managed to work the loose blindfold up onto her forehead, just above her right eye. She could see her picture on the front page of the paper. They used the glamour shot from the L’Oréal ad. Next to that, there was a picture of the kidnapping. A still frame in digital reprint.

“What are you reading?” she asked him.

“The scores for the World Cup matches.”

He did not look up.

“And who are you rooting for?”

The Black Dolphin stopped reading and forced his eyes to meet hers.

“I do not root for anyone,” he said.

“Then why read the scores?”

His neck muscles twitched.

“Because I like to know who wins and who loses.”

“I don’t understand,” Simone said.

“You wouldn’t.” He stood up and walked to the window, looking out beyond the curtains at the California wilderness. “People like you and your father are people who keep track of the 55 tally to know where everyone else is. I keep track of the tally to know where I am.” He let the curtains fall back into place.

“Monsieur Dauphin,” Simone said, lifting her tongue and parting her lips, “I think you are a very serious man in a terribly silly world, or just the opposite, and the world is too serious and you are too silly.”

The Black Dolphin spoke softly,

“It is the first one, I assure you.”

Simone nodded.

“That is what I thought.”

56

*

December, 1989. Los Angeles, California.

Vigo shifted the BMW into second gear as it slid past a corner boutique. The buildings of

Los Angeles loomed behind them like great stone pillars, vestiges of some apocryphal god – reminders of their beleagured anonymity.

Simone was beside him.

“It’s not much farther,” Vigo said. He checked the rearview mirror and signaled when he made turns before smiling at Simone.

“I’m sure I’ll adore it.”

“We can lay low. Use the time to settle ourselves, plan to get out of the country maybe.”

“Where will we go?” Simone asked.

“I have friends in Cairo, Beirut, Hamburg, Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang – you name it.”

“I’d love to see Moscow,” Simone said. “And Pyongyang,” she added.

“There are beautiful women in the DPRK that wear staunch blue uniforms and act as traffic cops – taking place of traffic lights – quite a sight.”

“I’m sure,” Simone said.

“They won’t be around forever. They’ll be replaced by machines as electricity is finally restored to the country.” Vigo sighed. “Perhaps I’m just a nostalgic fool, but I love the Koreans’ dogged hatred of the West. No one hates America quite like Korea.”

“You’re a sentimental Marxist-Leninnist, aren’t you?” Simone laughed. The city was an iridescent pastiche through the windows of the car. “Do you think we’ll ever see revolution?” she asked.

“There’s been plenty of revolutions in our lifetimes,” Vigo said. 57

“I mean in America.”

Vigo lit a cigarette and cracked his window.

“There won’t be any revolution until working class people’s see who the enemy is.”

“And when will they see that?” Simone asked.

“When the right people are swinging from the gallows.”

Vigo watched Simone’s face.

“What of ‘the terror’?”

“What of it?” Vigo sat back in his seat as they came to another red light. “The Cheka used to cut the skin off of dissidents’ hands and make a skin-glove from it. In the French revolution, you were fed to the guillotine. The Kronstadt rebellion was met with an ultimatum by the Bolsheviks. Do you understand? You know what Stalin said? He said, ‘Terror is the quickest way to a new society.’ He was not wrong.”

“A true revolution is then inseparable from terror,” Simone said.

“Yes. By definition, a revolution is a minority imposing their will against a majority. The oppressed not only have a right to hate their oppressors, but to take up arms against them.”

“I had a dream about us last night,” Simone said, looking out her window. “We were leading a cadre of workers and their sympathizers. We were dressed in black pants and red shirts.

We were carrying rifles and raising them in the air. Men and women held grenades that were in the shapes of their hearts. We were singing songs and chanting, on our way to take control of the

Parthenon. But as we marched the long road towards it, you fell in the dust.”

Vigo looked at her.

“And what happened?” he asked. 58

“I tried to help you up, but I couldn’t. You were too heavy for me. I felt so weak after the long journey and I couldn’t pick you up, as hard as I tried. I kept falling.”

“And?”

Simone frowned.

“I couldn’t leave you there. I was so terrified. Our comrades were glaring at me with these perplexed expressions. They kept telling me that we could not stop. That we would be surrounded. That the revolution would wither. So, I raised my rifle and I shot you in the heart.

You died instantly. Your blood soaked into the dust, and then I woke up.”

Simone looked at him.

“Promise me,” she said, “that you would do the same for me if I were to fall.”

59

*

Simone sat on the couch with her legs crossed. She was wearing one of the Black

Dolphin’s bath robes and her hair was up in a towel. The sun filled the sky outside the patio door and there was a thin breeze moving through the palm trees near the sidewalk. She rubbed her forehead and saw the hair dye she had used had stained her fingers black.

She had preferred the cabin in the woods.

She switched the channel to the news.

Infographics splayed themselves across her television screen.

A talking-head said,

“In a recent press release given jointly by the French and American governments, new evidence was made public in the kidnapping of Simone Beauchamp, daughter of French aviation magnate Arnaud Beauchamp. This evidence suggests that the Palestinian terror organization, the

Palestinian People’s Army, was behind the abduction. The PPA has denied any complicity in the kidnapping and, in a statement given to Al Jazeera, an unidentified representative of the PPA had this to say:

‘The Palestinian People’s Army had no involvement with Beauchamp’s kidnapping. The French and American governments are utilizing the same mechanisms they always use to invalidate the struggles of oppressed peoples. Further investigation will exonerate the PPA and, in the process, this act will also shed much needed light on the plight of the Palestinian people.’

The unidentified representative from the PPA went on to say, and I quote, ‘Anyone with eyes could see that the Black Dolphin kidnapped Beauchamp.’”

Simone shut off the TV and stood up. She lit a cigarette and opened the patio door and stood there smoking in the Black Dolphin’s bathrobe, breathing in the dry air. 60

There were little congruent single story houses dotting the land all around her. Tiny yards with clotheslines and rotary sprinklers and weathered privacy fences and rusting minivans and golden retrievers and mailboxes and oil stains and small, tasteful hedgerows.

She sat back down on the couch and picked up the copy of Trotsky’s My Life the Black

Dolphin had bought for her and read,

‘The October Revolution found my father a very prosperous man. My mother had died in 1910, but my father lived to see the rule of the Soviets. At the height of the civil war, which raged with especial fury in the South and was accompanied by constant changes of government, the old man of seventy was obliged to walk hundreds of miles to find shelter in Odessa. The Reds were a menace to him because he was rich; the Whites persecuted him because he was my father. After the South had been freed of White soldiers by the Soviet troops, he was enabled to come to Moscow. He had lost all his savings in the Revolution. For more than a year he ran a small state mill near Moscow. The Commissar of Food at that time, Tzyurupa, used to enjoy chatting with him on agricultural subjects. My father died of typhus in the spring of 1922, at the very moment when I was reading my report at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International.’

“Fathers,” Simone said, “not much use for them.”

She heard a knock at the door and the Black Dolphin unlocked it and walked in carrying a bag of groceries. Simone watched him walk into the kitchen and set the groceries and his pistol on the table. There were apples and eggs, milk, and a bottle of red.

“They were talking about you on the news,” she said. “Interviewed a man from the PPA.”

“Did they now?” He lit a cigarette and sat down in the armchair next to her.

“Is it true?” she asked.

“Why does that matter?”

“It doesn’t matter, but all this time I’ve never asked who hired you. Now I’m just curious.”

“You don’t need to know who.” 61

“I know I don’t need to know, but I’d like to. Was it the Palestinians or is that just a bourgeois lie?”

The Black Dolphin tightened his belt.

“It was not the Palestinians who hired me.”

“Who did?”

“Enough,” the Black Dolphin said. “I’m tired.”

“I only want to know-”

“I said, enough!” he shouted.

Simone folded her hands in her lap and scrunched up her face.

They sat in silence for a moment.

“You did not need to shout,” she said.

“I apologize,” he stared at the clock on the wall.

“You have no right to shout at me. I’ve been a perfect hostage. I’ve done everything you’ve asked.” Simone paused. “I don’t even know your name.”

The Black Dolphin looked at her.

“Why should you know my name? No one knows my name.”

“That’s exactly why I should know it. I’m your closest comrade. If anyone should know your name it should be me.”

The L’OReal ad Simone starred in was playing on the television. Her hair was cascading around her head with volume and shine.

“My name is Vigo,” the Black Dolphin said. “Vigo Vegas.”

62

*

January, 1990. Los Angeles, California.

“What is the plan?” Simone asked.

“The plan?” Vigo said.

“Yes. What is the plan? What are we to do?”

“It’s complicated, Simone.”

“Don’t give me that,” she huffed, placing a pot of water on the stove.

“Are you asking me who hired me?” he asked.

“I wasn’t,” she said. “But now I am. Who did hire you?”

“I said it was complicated.”

“Which means what? That I’m not supposed to ask about it?”

“No. Just – sit down,” Vigo guided her into a chair by the table, grasping her shoulders gently.

“Okay, I’m sitting down,” Simone said, “what now?”

“You must understand that I took this job with pure intentions,” Vigo said. He lit a cigarette. He looked absurd in his yellow polo shirt and khaki slacks. Simone felt a twinge of pain looking at him, so old and beleaguered by the weight of his yesterdays.

“I was approached by a man in Paris. A kid, really. A boy. He ran up to me at the open- air bar. I was standing at the counter and this kid in a baseball cap ran up to me and said that there were men who knew who I was. He said they wanted to meet me and possibly hire me and he handed me a cellphone number and ran off. You could imagine, I put my hand on my gun and looked around – sure there were shadows off in the distance watching my every move. I remember thinking, ‘The Mossad? Ex-DST? CIA? The Libyans?’ 63

“I left the carnival and went home – a hotel with small furnishings. I sat on the couch and stared at the number. I dialed it from a throw-away phone. A man answered.

“‘Oui?’ he said.

“I asked him. ‘What do you want?’

“‘You’re the man we need,’ he said. ‘We want you to kidnap Beauchamp. Meet us at this address, Black Dolphin.’

“A message came through, giving me the address of a street in Paris and I met them at a small apartment near the Champs-Éllysées. They were all cloaked in blue sweatshirts. Hands in their pockets. Faces unseen.”

“What did they offer you?” Simone asked.

“They offered me the deed.”

“The deed? The deed to what?”

“The deed itself. You. This. They had information and I had the means.”

“That hardly seems reason to kidnap me.” Simone crossed her arms.

“But it was,” Vigo said. “You were the prize.”

“A prize?”

“An example. One of them, a young man – a de facto sort of leader – he said to me, ‘This kidnapping is a reminder, to all those who think the Left is dead. It is not dead, merely sleeping – fat and lazy and needing to stretch its limbs. Hibernating under the weight of a neoliberal winter.’ He said, ‘Anarchists delaying trains and terrorists killing civilians has done little to stem the tide of the West’s burgeoning sense of security. You are going to end that. Beauchamp is the daughter of an obscenely wealthy man – a man who has done much to wrong the world through 64 his hubris and scorn. It is the propaganda of the deed – with as little blood shed as possible – that we offer you.’

“My efforts in the past have done little to change the course of history,” Vigo said. “And this, well, it’s pure Hollywood.”

Simone sat in silence.

“No one lives in a vacuum,” Vigo reminded her, “and there are those who are willing to challenge and do battle with evil.”

“What were you going to do with me?” Simone asked.

“Nothing,” Vigo said. “I don’t know. I suppose I would have let you go eventually. You were the greatest victim of this to me – in a variety of ways. I had no idea you’d be the person you are.”

Vigo turned.

“Vigo,” Simone said, touching his shoulder. “We have the chance now. We can forget about the past, start anew.”

“What do you know about my past?” he laughed.

“You killed three policemen in Paris in the 70s. You were in all the papers. I’ve read the microfilms in the libraries,” Simone said. “And you killed my guards and my driver.”

“Those men, they were sycophants – but working class nonetheless. I felt no pleasure in killing any of them. They attacked me.”

“Let us do something then.” Simone said.

Vigo looked at her.

“Are you serious?” he asked.

“Of course I’m serious.” 65

*

Simone said to Vigo,

“I’m ready. There’s no amount of theory or affectation. We should do something.”

“Do something? Such lovely posturing, Simone, I’d think you meant it.”

“I do mean it. We should attack something. Kill someone.”

Vigo laughed, poured a glass of Bourgogne.

“Who? For what purpose?” he said.

“Hollywood,” Simone said. “It’s putrid and evil. Everyone knows that.” She took the bottle from him and poured herself a glass. “We could assassinate the ratings board of the

MPAA or take a group of executives hostage and execute them on live television.”

“I don’t think you’re ready for something like that. You’ve no experience. And what would it prove?”

Simone set the bottle down. It thumped on the counter.

“When I was thirteen and visiting Naples,” she said, “I snuck away from my body guards.

During my father’s business travels, I was always stuck in the hotels, watching bad television in languages I only sometimes understood. My father hated it when I was out in the city without him, so he always had two burly fellows in suits follow me around with guns.

“One night, I had my guards take me to a market. They generally acquiesced to my requests, so long as my father had not given them explicit instructions otherwise. They would only speak to tell me ‘no.’

“I walked into the crowded market and ambled past the stalls. There was fresh fruit, meats, skinned lambs, vendors selling small toys and fresh butter. The people around had a thick aroma of musk and sweat. The folds of their clothes, the clack of their shoes on the cobblestones, 66 the murmur of their speech. When I saw how crowded it was, I simply walked as far into the crowd as I could. I moved so smoothly through it, and I was so short back then, that my little blonde head dissolved into an interstices of swarthy arms and faces. I’m sure my guards panicked when they’d realized I’d left them. I’m sure they split up and searched the market, communicating through their ear pieces, cursing one another for losing sight of me. They thought about what to tell my father and how to keep their jobs.

“I left the market and turned down an alley behind these paper thin paisley houses, cut across several streets.

“I saw a dog eating the bones of a chicken. Several children were throwing rocks at it from a fire escape and the dog would snarl and the kids would clamber around and laugh. An old woman in a long dress and apron was sweeping dirt out of the front door of her house and off her stoop. There were beads of sweat on her brow.

“It was a dark avenue. Old arches and weathered stones, trash, concrete stoops. Very dirty. The moon was up, I remember that. I remember it like anything. It shone bright and round and yellow and Naples sat below it, a modern Gomorrah – pillars of salt.

“A shadow moved. There was a man standing in front of me. No, it was a shadow and it became a man wearing a black track suit. His hair was slicked backed and he was chewing on the end of a toothpick.

“He held my shoulder, told me that he’d spotted me walking around, said it wasn’t safe for a girl like me by myself. I told him to take his hands off me and that I was quite old enough to walk around. He grabbed my other shoulder again and peered at my face. He seemed to be examining me, looking for a distinguishing mark – as if I were branded cattle. I can never forget 67 what happened next. He said, ‘Wait, I know who you are. You’re the Beauchamp girl. Your father the aviation Baron. He owns the airport.’

“I stepped back. He smelled like wine and Brie. His face was taught and angular and his eyes were focused on mine.

“He tried to pick me up – pinned my arms to my side. I struggled for a moment. I started to scream, ‘Let go of me, you fiend,’ but he covered my mouth. I stomped on the top of his feet as hard as I could. He grabbed my throat, but he’d let go of my arms. With my free hand I stabbed his fingers with my eyes. I think I cut one pretty badly. He was bleeding, but he was still trying, breathing all over me with his stinky breath.

“I didn’t have a weapon, but I had a key. This key,” Simone said, unearthing a golden key hanging from the end of a thin chain nestled between her breasts. “I’ve worn it on a necklace for years. It is the key to our summer home in Switzerland – something my father of all people had given me. I have fond memories of that place. My father says my mother had loved

Switzerland, before she died of course.

“But anyway, I broke the necklace and put the key in my fist and cocked my arm.

“When he came at me again, I hit him in the throat. The key hurt my palm. Bruised it.

But I kept hitting him – stabbing him. He put his hands up and I knocked him over. I got on top of him and stabbed his neck as hard as I could.

“He was gasping for air and clutching his throat, and there were these great hiccoughs of blood pouring out of him and this horrible, draining, terrified look in his eye. A pale widening of the iris and a grasping at the edges – blood just pouring out of him, leaking through his fingers, garbled sounds coming from his lips – and then he died. Right in front of me.”

Simone looked at Vigo. 68

“When you say that I am not ready, I think you underestimate me,” she said.

“Maybe so,” Vigo motioned for her to continue. “Tell me what happened.”

“My dress was covered in blood. My arm was slathered with it. I walked back to the market. I expected people to scream, but they didn’t. They looked shocked and annoyed, but not scared. A few women took me to the police precinct. They called my father and let me shower and sit in the Lieutenant’s office. When my father showed up, he refused to talk to me. He spoke with the Lieutenant, asking him what happened and never once asking me if I were okay. On the ride home, he scolded me for straying away from my bodyguards and told me I was to never go about the city by myself again. I remember trying to catch the eyes of our driver in the rearview mirror. I was pleading for some kind of contact. I remember very much wanting him to just look at me in the reflection – just for a second – to let me know I was not alone. But he didn’t. He stared ahead, willfully not using the rearview – afraid to accept my gaze, afraid of what my father would do.

“When I got home, my father fired my bodyguards in front of me, as if he were saying,

‘Look what you’ve made me do.’ I hated him after that. It was the final humiliation. Everything was business. He justified everything he did that way. I’m the child of a series of transactions.”

Simone paused.

“I have always been ready,” she said after a long time. “I’m not afraid of death.”

“I can see that.”

“Where do we go to train?”

“So presumptuous,” Vigo laughed.

Simone took a gulp of wine from her glass.

“We’ll leave for Beirut tomorrow,” he said. 69

Simone took another sip of her wine.

“Good, I’ll be ready in the morning.”

70

The Writer

August, 2013. Akron, Ohio.

It was late evening and M was asleep on the couch, snoring. The writer was cooking chicken breasts in the toaster oven and working on his novel and watching her sleep. There was a pleasant, roaring stillness about her as she slept, encumbered by the weight of her dreams.

He said to her quietly, “Aw, you’re like a sweet little snoring angel.”

She popped awake, coughing, adjusting her position, falling back asleep. He bit his tongue.

The sky was floating over them, awry and filled with midnight clouds, sullen and wanton in their movements. They blocked the moon. The radiator hissed. He wished her sweet and pleasant dreams as she slept on the couch he’d brought from his old apartment. The sky was a sliver just past the redbrick corners of his building. He wanted nothing more than to go home as he watched the clouds drift by in their sullen mood.

“The most important things to write are often the hardest to admit,” he wrote – then he swallowed it back up in erasure.

“Life is a passage into nothingness. Some people yawn and some people curl up into cynicism in the face of that darkness. They project what they want and lose sight of the division burning up all of us. There isn’t a magical weapon that can slice through the ignorance – no special trick that can make an audience fall in love with you. No guarantee that your words won’t hurt – strike a discordant response. Blasphemy in prose. You don’t have any control over that.

It’s like Sartre’s radical freedom – how can we be free if we did not choose to be born? And we can’t always love each other, despite the better angels of our nature. We’re all lost – in search of 71 love and truth – little, broken, snoring angels wishing well on the people we’ve hurt.”

Violins and harmonicas hummed in his brain.

He kissed M’s forehead and hoped she wouldn’t wake up.

Born of prose and painted hues.

He ate the chicken before slouching down in front his novel with the feeling that all of his body’s weight was in his eyes.

72

*

When the writer came home from workshop, M was getting their laundry together to do at her parent’s house. Her hair was blue now. She’d died it while the writer laid down on the floor outside the bathroom and watched her. Now it looked like she had a tangy berry for a head.

The writer told her that he loved it.

She was walking around the apartment wearing gray leggings and a dark blouse, fancy boots. He asked her if she was still going out and she said yes. He asked her what she was doing and she said, “Hanging out with Moby.” The writer nodded and told her that he’d workshopped the story with her in it. She said, “That’s good,” and then, “Where’s my cellphone?” The writer stood there in their living room with a dumb look on his face.

“A few people seemed to like it,” he went on. “And I’m a thoroughly dislikeable narrator,” he laughed.

“Oh, they just don’t know you like I do,” she said, walking to the bathroom. “Oh, here’s my phone – in the trashcan.”

He held the door for her as she carried their laundry out and told her to have a good time with Moby and then walked back inside and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of his laptop.

He called his friend D, who was several time zones away.

“If you want to make people uncomfortable with a story,” the writer said to him, “talk about ejaculate. No one likes to think about ejaculate.”

D laughed. “It goes cold in your hand after like five seconds. It’s the only substance I know of that goes from 98 degrees to a cool 60 in no time.”

“That’s jacket weather,” the writer said.

73

*

His plucky redheaded girlfriend of the past, L, had gone crazy her first year of college.

She had sent cryptic messages to the writer claiming that she was Ariel from the Bible.

Aliens and spirit-demons could read and control human thoughts. The eyes of those tainted would glow gold, bright and shimmering in her sight. She had asked him where he thought evil came from – told him that everything was little beneath our sight. Asked him to cut her scalp as proof that the skull beneath was not made of crystal – that she was not a superhuman weapon designed by creatures from beyond the stars.

It took a year for it to happen – he knew that he’d driven her mad. He waxed and waned as she waxed and waned. He burned himself. Cursed himself. Spat in the faces of all the failures he’d seen. Pity and pain get no pity from the fragile, and the pain of knowing that she was beyond him – beyond his reach, beyond his need or love – transcendent and in a nightmare, terrified him.

He asked the God he didn’t believe in to send him mad.

To let him join her.

To punish him for his indiscretions.

God was silent – as if to say,

“Go thou and suffer beneath my sight. Go thou, go thou, die hence. Alone and amidst my wrath.”

Trust in strangers, right? Nothing of the sort.

That’s what it was like for the writer when L was in the psych ward. Lonely, scared, wanting to feel in control, wanting to be strong – not for someone else or for himself – but just wanting a fraction of the peace that life seemed to promise. 74

A new city was glowing on the horizon.

He was leaving L behind without consolation – undeserved as it may have been.

He was broken. Broke. Bum-flat and non-descript.

He’d gobbled more drugs than some people have seen in their lives. Money had carried him like buoy – but the sea was gone now that he was on his own.

He hadn’t talked to his mother in months. His father – in a year.

75

*

The writer dreamt that he was sitting on a park bench with Slavoj Žižek.

Dr. Žižek was gesticulating wildly – his fingers an excruciating emblem of a meandering compass.

“Look at the sky,” Žižek said, wiping his nose. “My God, have you ever seen such an evening sky?”

Žižek swiped his nose again and sent his fingers into a flurry of motion.

The writer looked at the sky. It was a swirl of cirrus and candy-color hues of orange and purple.

“It is a great sky,” the writer said.

“Do you know,” Žižek said, wiping his hand on his pants and then plucking at his shirt,

“that Hegel said that the sky was the principle cause of ideology in any given society.”

Žižek sniffed at the air.

The writer did not think Hegel ever said that.

“I don’t think Hegel ever said that,” the writer said.

“This is true, but – ah, uh – this, this is the principle which makes us cling to the very act of desire – we desire to desire. We desire to illuminate the sky, and the sky is only one of many natural phenomenon which led us to formulate ideas, conceptions, various platitudes, and manifestations of our inner consciousness – projected out upon the world via the beauty of the natural world, away from and back to itself.”

The writer thought about it.

“I wonder what we’re doing here,” the writer said.

“We are going for a walk. Come, let us stroll.” 76

*

Acid jazz. Those tender, sully notes. The piping wail of bopping brass. The unencumbered love of movement – of phraseology – of notes fantastic and living life while alive.

It was a music that asked you if you were awake, hip to it, free from weight.

It broke his heart inward.

He was sitting, hunched over, typing frenetically – spasms of disjointed word-love – given gifts of deleted prose – cigarette dangling from his lips, smoke getting in his eye.

No room to breathe.

Hate flared out of his nostrils. Self-righteous rage leaked out of the corner of his mouth.

Pain and tears and hunger and shame worked its way out his fingertips. He could feel the cancer welling up inside him and he breathed deep.

He imagined some sort of camera swirling around him on a track taking a panoramic shot of his absurd posture – no glimpse of the words he was typing – fractions of moments held in close-up. It started to make him feel sick. Writing about writing about writing.

He felt a bit light headed – like someone else should drive.

The writer got up and took a beer from the fridge.

There isn’t enough of me on the page, he thought.

“The first thing you should know about my parents is that they’d find it pretty crummy how I’m carrying on about all this ejaculate,” the writer wrote – then deleted it.

He tried again.

“My parents loved their kids and stayed together for years for the sake of me and my sisters. They were unbelievably unhappy all the time but depression takes years to metastasize.”

He deleted it. 77

“When I was a kid, my dad worked a high-paying, soulless job that turned him into a cynical man that could never think of the world as anything other than a hostile place.”

The writer thought about deleting it but kept it.

“I’m using quotation marks that don’t make sense.”

That he did delete.

“My mom was a self-effacing, lovable woman who didn’t have a lot of foresight or personal ambition but gave everything she could to her kids when she wasn’t crippled by a certain special kind of anxiety.”

He almost deleted the whole thing.

He didn’t like writing about himself or his family. It felt pointless.

He sent it to his sisters in the morning as a joke and then wished he hadn’t.

78

*

September, 2013. Akron, Ohio.

“When I was younger,” M said, “I was fat. No one noticed me. I wasn’t pretty. I didn’t feel pretty. I felt invisible. I went through most of my life thinking I’d never have sex with anyone because, ya know, ‘Who would want me?’ In Junior High I was friends with these three blonde Catholic girls. Super religious. Sat by themselves at lunch. No one liked any of us, so I started to sit with them. But,” M said, chuckling, “they wouldn’t let me sit with them at lunch one day, and they told me to go sit with Susan – the girl with Down Syndrome. So, I did. All through the rest of Junior High I sat with Susan, and you know what, I learned something: there was nothing wrong with me or Susan and everything wrong with all of them.”

M took a swig of her 40 oz. She was wearing her “REAL WOMEN DRINK BEER” t- shirt and slumping down into the sofa cushions.

The writer looked at her, leaning into his palm.

“When I was in Junior High,” he said, “I wanted desperately not to be one of those kids that no one talked to, that everyone thought was quiet and weird. I had no social skills whatsoever. In grade school I’d been ‘the weird-kid’. In Junior High, I was adrift in this river of strangers and tension. I had no one to talk to. I didn’t want to be a loser. For some reason in my first year, I’d sit at the unoccupied end of the ‘cool’ table during lunch and said nothing to no one, and, you know, they ignored me – made fun of me from time to time. I remember this one guy asking one of the popular girls about different guys she’d want to kiss. He said my name and

I remember looking up to see this total look of disgust on her face…” the writer took another drink. “One day, one of the cool kids started talking to me. Don’t even remember how it started, but I remember that I ended up explaining the entire plot of the film Papillion to him – which 79

I’d watched the night before – in excruciating detail.” The writer paused. “We actually became friends later in high school and never talked about it.”

They both took another drink.

“One time in high school, I was assigned to do a group project with this jock and two other ditsy useless girls,” M said. “They knew I was quiet and smart. In fact, the jock said as much. So, I pretty much ended up doing the whole project while they fucked about. When the teacher asked us who would be giving the oral presentation, the jock turned to me and said something like, ‘I think M said she wanted to do it. Right, M?’ and I remember picking up my notes and binders, walking to the front of the class, and stopping by the trash can. I turned and –

I could pretty much do this at will – I threw up. I looked at the jock, wiped my mouth, and smiled at him. The teacher sent me to the nurse and the other three had to give the presentation,” she laughed. “They made my life hell after that though.” M took a big drink.

“You stood up for yourself,” the writer said. “I’m sorry people were so awful to you. I was picked on a lot as a kid too.”

“It’s okay.”

“No, no it isn’t. People shouldn’t treat other people like that. Why is there a complete failure of decency among people? I mean, a lot of it’s this goddamned system. It’s this putrid race they put us all through. We’re all competing with each other to survive.”

“You say it’s the system, but people make the system.”

“But we didn’t get a choice in that – we inherited our unfreedom. We inherited these legacies of white supremacy and class struggle. We’re the recipients of one hundred years of failed Left-wing revolution. Nothing short of the apocalypse will destroy capitalism.” 80

“That’s true. But isn’t there something rotten inside of us to make it all this way in the first place? I mean, I’m no gem of a person. I’ve been whorish. I’ve stolen things. I’ve lied to people.”

“I think it’s something within us that is exacerbated by capitalism. So, it’s really the same thing. Capitalism brings out the worst in most people.” The writer stopped talking for a second and turned to M. “And I don’t really care how many people you’ve slept with. It doesn’t make you a bad person. I think you’re fucking great. It’s insufferable that people look at your blue hair and your tattoos and make all sorts of judgments. You are one of the most decent people I’ve ever met. You’re honest, you care deeply about others, and you hate phoniness.”

M smiled. “I think you’re a good person too.”

She leaned over and kissed him.

They started making faces at each other. Opening their mouths or scrunching their brows and pouting their lips in rapid, manic oscillation. This dissolved into a flurry of kisses and giggles and even more kisses.

M fell asleep on the writer’s shoulder as the credits of an episode of Comedy Bang!

Bang! rolled through the vertical hold of his television set.

81

Alexei

October, 2013. Southern Ossetia, Russia.

The sky was turning purplish-black. Alexei lit a cigarette. His nose was broken and blood was dripping down onto his shirt. There was a sign for Nidloz and Kreshko in another 20km. A shooting star cut across the evening sky and buried itself in the earth. Black, broken night was descending.

He turned on the radio. Kremlin Gremlin was playing. Acrid, nasal whines with cacophonous accompaniment. It screamed,

“He didn’t sell all that heroin. I swear I’m telling the truth, Officer. He wouldn’t shoot that Krokodil because Krokodil bites off your legs. Yeah, Krokodil bites off your legs.”

Alexei’s face was throbbing. He wanted to pull off the road and change his shirt, wipe off some of the blood, but he also didn’t want to stop moving. More distance between him and what lay behind. A fraction of the tracks inevitably leading back home.

Davi was still in Kreshko, cooking up the rest of the last batch. Sergei would get back an hour or two before Alexei. They were fools, Alexei knew that, but here was the chance he’d been waiting for.

They had the heroin.

That was weighed and accounted for.

And now they had the ingredients.

Krokodil.

When he’d first heard about it, he’d thought it was a lie. Homemade desomorphine. Eight times stronger than heroin. Dangerous to shoot, but powerful enough to send you into a nodding 82 dreamworld of smooth colors and sliding fixtures from which you’d never want to leave. Single, inward, pacified and gratified like no other – wanting and feeling like you’ve never felt. Spastic, broken, and maybe happy. “But if you miss a vein,” he had been told, “theirs is no return. You become a monster. A scaly, rotting monster that should only exist in terrifying dreams.”

That much was certain.

The highway was flying past his windshield. He was unsure if anyone was following him

– at a distance, unseen.

He looked at the hammer in the passenger seat.

There was still blood on it.

He’d meant to throw it once he’d got on the highway, but now he found himself thinking that it was a good hammer, and hammers were expensive. It would be a waste to let a little blood from some fool’s skull make him waste a perfectly good hammer.

Alexei thought about the shop keep and whether he had hit him too hard. The guy had crumpled like a doll. Alexei’d worn a balaclava, but he was still on video. He tried not to think too hard about it, lest it upset him.

There was a little daylight left. At the next rest stop, Alexei pulled over and parked his truck. There weren’t any other cars in the lot. He got out and stretched. Beneath the moon, he spotted an owl watching him from a low-hanging branch. Its eyes were big and yellow. It called out to him. He picked up a stone and threw it at the bird. It fell short and the owl watched it fall.

Alexei walked into the abandoned restroom. Dead leaves were scattered across the tiles and crunched under the weight of his boots. A crossed-out swastika was on the wall above the urinal. Next to it were the words, “Nazis kill Jews.” 83

Alexei wasn’t sure who had written the words, the person who drew the swastika or the person who crossed it out.

84

*

The war had only lasted in Ossetia for five days, but you could still see the traces – the holes it left.

War is not something that can be conjured up in words.

There is only silence.

Alexei had been a little boy when it happened. His father had been a worker in a factory that smelted iron. Papa would come home at night with dirty hands and worn expressions and he would talk about the war as if it were somewhere far away. Alexei knew what gunfire sounded like. He wasn’t afraid of it.

The houses were mostly hidden in the hills and they’d been blasted apart by someone’s artillery years ago. A few tenants stayed up there in the hills. Hill people. Boarded up windows.

High winds.

The first time Alexei picked up a gun he used it to kill a feral dog that terrorized the children in his neighborhood. They’d found the gun in an alley. Someone had put a brick on top of it and left it there. Alexei had picked it up and the other boys told him to put it back but asked if it was loaded and what type of gun it was. He told them to shut up and that he would kill

Gulag with it and walked away. They followed at a distance, watching him from the corner of each muddy factory-soot street. He walked, gun in hand, barefoot, face smeared with dirt, and he found the dog, who everyone called Gulag, eating out of the ribcage of a another dog. Their eyes met and Gulag let out a breathy grunt. His jowls flapped and blood and saliva fell from them in globs. Alexei took a step forward and raised the gun. He held it with both hands and looked down the sight. Gulag stepped forward, paused, and then snarled into a howling stampede – eyes wide with rage, fangs bared. 85

Alexei took a breath, fired, and the shot hit Gulag in the chest. The dog slipped in the mud and fell to earth, snarling and biting and snapping at the mud in front of it, craning its neck to look at Alexei, who watched it die beneath the gray sky without muttering a word. Then it started to rain and the rain mixed with the blood and the mud and it began to pool at Alexei’s feet and he smiled.

It was only five miles until Kreshko. When he got there, Davi, Sergei, and Alexei would unload the score and cook some more Krokodil in separate batches and stockpile the stuff to sell on the street. They’d start unloading the heroin first, then cut the supply and sell the Krokodil when the addicts were hungry. They’d pay more for Krokodil once the heroin was gone, and once the heroin returned they’d pay even more because heroin didn’t bite off your arms and legs and leave you dying in an alley with scaly, melting flesh.

86

*

October, 2013. Kreshko, Russia.

A mask in place of an image – that is how Alexei felt walking into his house. The walls were mired in moonlight.

Davi was smoking crack when Alexei walked in. Sergei was passed out on the floor.

“What is this?” Alexei asked. “I drive all this way only to find my two best friends completely fucked up. Smoking crack, lazing about. What do you have to say for yourselves?” he said, placing his hands on his hips.

Davi exhaled. His eyes dilated button-size. “Alexei,” he said, “it is you. My friend, come here.” Davi got up from the dilapidated couch, throwing off the blankets. He grasped the back of

Alexei’s neck with his free hand and pulled him in. “You are a man among men!” Davi exclaimed.

“You should not smoke that stuff,” Alexei said, setting his bag of contraband on the floor by the broken recliner. “It is bad for you.”

Davi laughed. “I have been smoking crack since I was twelve and it hasn’t hurt me at all.” He raised a fist in mock defiance and did a little dance, lighting the crack pipe mid-jig.

“What is wrong with Sergei?” Alexei asked.

“He tried some of the heroin. I told him I’d already tried it and that it was good, but he said he didn’t believe me and he did it anyway.” Davi exhaled. “He is an addict. We must watch him.”

Sergei moaned. “Fuck you,” he said. He threw up on the floor and it seeped in between the planks.

“Fucking hell. You just threw up on the floor, Sergei.” Alexei kicked him. “Wake up!” 87

“Fuck you,” Sergei said again, rolling onto his back. “Is Alexei here? I’m too fucked up.”

“Yes,” Alexei said, “I’m here. You’re lying in your own puke, Sergei. Get off the floor.”

Sergei got up, craning himself and stumbling to the faded purple recliner.

“I’m a man of my word,” he said.

“You’re a fuck up and a junkie,” Alexei said.

He picked up the plastic bag containing the score from the robbery and threw it on the couch. “It was enough to make it.”

“That’s my Alexei,” Davi said, “always coming through.”

“The clerk there is dead.”

“Are you sure?” Davi asked, rifling through the bag, pulling out the iodine and myriad containers.

“No. But I think I may have killed him.”

Davi exhaled sharply and sat down on the couch.

“No matter. These things happen. You should celebrate. You’re home.”

88

*

November, 2013. Kreshko, Russia.

The heroin came from Afghanistan. The Krokodil came from codeine, iodine, and red phosphorus cooked in a pan for thirty minutes.

Alexei cooked while Sergei kept watch out the window, peeking past the curtains. Davi placed the finished product in vials to sell to junkies in Kreshko. He lined them up on the windowsill and they glowed red in the light of the sun. The smell of boiling iodine lingered in the air. The house smelled like a burned-out pharmacy.

Alexei said, “Do you think this will be enough?”

He looked at the shimmering vials.

Davi said, “Enough is always enough.”

Sergei agreed. “It’ll be enough until the next shipment.”

Alexei thought of the stories. Krokodil ate your flesh. Krokodil bit off your legs. Turned you into a crocodile.

“We’ll be fine,” Davi said.

There was a knock at the door.

Davi jumped and Alexei looked to Sergei.

“It’s Olga and Misha,” Sergei said. He frowned. “They look like something ate their heads.” He walked through the living room and opened the door.

Misha looked rail thin. His shirt barely stayed on his shoulders. Olga had a black hoodie on and she was pulling it tight around herself, looking behind her. Her hair was so bleached it was white.

“Can we come in or are you going to keep us outside?” Misha asked. 89

“Let them in, Sergei,” Alexei said, “they look hungry.”

Olga and Misha came in and Misha unlaced his boots. They sat on the couch and watched

Alexei put a single hit of Krokodil in front of them in a button-sized vial.

“This heroin is a fine quality,” Alexei said. The hit was pure Krokodil. “One hundred rubles a hit or 1,000 rubles a gram.”

Misha’s face was covered in dirt and grease. His teeth were pointy and crooked - his nose was angular. It seemed to pull his face forward and Alexei thought it made him look like a rat.

“Give us two hits,” he said. “Can we shoot here?”

“By all means,” Alexei said. “Just don’t spray any blood on the ceiling when you clear the needle.”

Misha gave Alexei the money and Alexei counted it and gave him the Krokodil and went back to cooking and didn’t watch either of them slide the needles into the crease of their arms.

Olga took her hit first and then Misha followed. They’d laid back on the couch and stared at the ceiling while Alexei finished cooking the next batch.

“They were hungry,” Davi said.

“They’re always hungry,” Sergei said. “That’s why they come here.”

“Why are so many people so hungry?” Alexei asked. He poured Krokodil into several vials. “There must be something wrong with the world.”

David laughed.

“There’s something wrong with the world alright. You’re looking at it.”

“We’re a product of our surroundings,” Alexei said. “No better than the straights and normals. We’re all fucked. Riddled with insecurities. Only fools think they are beyond reproach.” 90

“Oh Alexei, please, regale us with your pious thought,” Sergei said.

“That’s what I mean. You’re being sarcastic, but the premise of your thought is still the same as if you were serious. Nothing is pious. We’re all lost wanderers. There isn’t much choice in a world we didn’t choose.”

Misha groaned on the couch.

“Ate his head,” Davi said.

“Ate his head,” Sergei said.

“Yes, it ate his head.”

91

*

December, 2013. Kreshko, Russia.

Alexei demanded primacy from things. Life was not allowed to surprise him. It often tried to, but he would bludgeon it back. Death was irrelevant to him. His or anyone else’s. He owed the world nothing and he sought to take from it everything he wanted. His only virtue was that he suffered no illusions about himself.

“What am I doing in Kreshko?” he asked himself as he arose from the white sheets on his brass frame bed. “How long have I been here? This miserable dirty city, with its stench and junkies and mangy dogs.” He looked out past the white lace curtain at the sun being strangled behind an overcast sky. “I hate it.”

Sergei was asleep on the couch as Alexei walked to the living room. Davi was putting vials of Krokodil in small bags – counting two, five, and ten successively – plopping them in with consummate speed. Alexei gave Davi a nod and made coffee in the kitchen.

“If my mother could see me now,” Davi said.

“She’d be proud of her son,” Alexei laughed as he put a pot of water on the stove to make coffee. “Making something of himself in this world full of hate and stupidity.”

Davi laughed.

“I’m serious,” Alexei said.

“Serious like a dottering old woman.”

“We’re entrepreneurs. Men of action. Boot-straps, like the Americans say. Full of enterprise and strong wills.”

Davi laughed even harder.

“But you’re a scoundrel,” he said. 92

“Yes, I am,” Alexei said. “And you’re my friends.”

The water was beginning to boil. Alexei put some grounds in a strainer and poured the water into a cup underneath it.

“What would you two do without me?” he asked.

“Well, Sergei would probably die,” Davi said, “but I’d come and find you.” Davi placed several more vials in a baggie and then put the baggie on the scale in front of him.

“You’d never find me.”

“Oh, yes I would. I’d kill you before I let you leave me in this God forsaken place. I’d track you down.” Davi said as he bobbed his head to an inaudible beat.

“I’m not an easy man to find. What makes you so sure of yourself?”

“What other way is there to be than sure of yourself?” Davi said. His face was motionless, his expression like calm granite.

“Quite right,” Alexei said, taking a sip from his purple mug. “Better to kill a brave man than a coward.”

Sergei rustled on the couch. “What are you fools talking about?” he said.

“I don’t know,” Davi said to Alexei, “maybe it is better to kill fools than anyone else.”

He nodded to Sergei.

“Whatever,” Sergei said, getting up off the couch. “Where are all our customers?”

Davi laughed. “You mean Olga and Misha?”

“No, I mean all the fucking customers we were supposed to be getting with this shit plan of yours.”

“They’ll come,” Alexei said. “Word will spread.”

“And then what? We let them turn into fucking crocodiles?” 93

“No, we sell the Krokodil and then start unloading the Afghani heroin.” Alexei took another sip of black coffee. He looked around.

This place is a mess, he thought.

“This shit is poison, you know?” Sergei said, holding up one of the little red vials to the light.

“Everything is poison,” Davi said.

“So, we sell poison to take care of the rats. I make money. You make money. The rats get high. Everybody wins.”

“And then the rats start melting,” Sergei said. “Have you ever seen a melted rat? It’s bad.”

“I’ve seen melted rats and dead children. Don’t talk to me like I don’t know. During a war, everything is legal.” Alexei walked up to Sergei and took a sip of his coffee. “I’m only going to say this once, so listen.” He looked straight into Sergei’s blue eyes. “I don’t give a fuck about what happens to them. They’re junkies. They’re the same as anyone else, so they deserve it. They deserve worse. Fuck ‘em.”

“Fuck ‘em,” Davi echoed.

“You’re sick,” Sergei said, smiling.

“You’re weak,” Alexei said. “And you’re stoned. Get off my fucking couch and go buy me some milk for my coffee.”

94

*

January, 2013. Kreshko, Russia.

Alexei had been right all along, and the junkies of Kreshko had arrived at their doorstep looking sullen and hungry, broken and withered. They went through the little red vials of

Krokodil in a matter of weeks. It had yet to bite off anyone’s legs, though there were rumors about intravenous zombies wandering the streets – black abscesses in their arms and legs. No one was dead yet, but it was uncertain how long until they’d start to fall apart.

Olga and Misha were the first to come back, and when they did, they came back with friends. They were always a motley sight. Alexei found them grotesque. At times he would have to leave the room in their presence. Their arms were always huddled against their bodies as if they were in a constant battle to stay warm. Their faces were always pale. Their teeth were chipped and their eyes were dark and hollow. Alexei couldn’t stand to look at them. He had to turn his head.

Other times, he laughed at them.

“Come one, come all,” Alexei would say to them as they filed past. “Step right up boys and girls!”

He’d heard the phrase in an American film years ago – a film about a man who worked as a ringmaster in a circus, a man who wanted nothing more than to leave the circus behind and write a book about the world and his travels and, ultimately, get some peace and quiet under the forgiving shade of a tree. Then one day the ringmaster simply decided to leave. There was no cause or provocation, he simply walked out of the circus before the start of a show and he never looked back. The ringmaster met many people and had many adventures in the movie, much of which Alexei had forgotten, but the ending was still clear in his mind. The movie ended with the 95 ringmaster sitting beneath an oak tree, stretching his legs, lolling his head to the side and, with a smile on his face, breathing his last, dying – a close-up of his mustachioed face morphing into a crane shot which slowly backed away from his body – a side profile in black and white, and then

– darkness.

Davi was counting the money as Sergei cooked dinner – sausage and potatoes.

Alexei was watching their old television set flicker. The Olympics were on.

Sergei was humming an old Young Pioneer song.

“Once we’ve finished unloading the rest of the heroin, I’m going to get out of this fucking country,” Alexei said as a figure skater spun in circles on the screen.

“And go where?” Sergei asked.

“I don’t care where you two go,” Alexei said, “but I’m not staying around here one moment longer than I have to.”

The judges on the television applauded and held up numbered placards.

“Are you going to be like Ivan and run to the United States?” Sergei asked, mocking

Alexei, flipping a sausage.

“Perhaps. I don’t know. But I’m going to get out of here. That’s for certain.”

Davi bundled another stack of money and laughed.

“You say that, but you won’t go,” Davi said.

“There’s nothing here for me. My father is dead, my mother is most likely dead, and you two are useless to me now.” Alexei switched off the T.V., kicking the dial with his boot and standing up. “The heroin is almost gone. That’s around $50,000 split three ways.”

They kept the money under the floorboards in the living room.

“Don’t forget the money from the Krokodil,” Sergei said. 96

“Yes, and that.”

“So? What are you saying?” Davi asked.

“I’m saying that, once the heroin is gone, we should go our separate ways.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Sergei said.

“I’ve said it before,” Alexei said, “but this time I mean it. I’ve no compunction about this.”

“I don’t think you’ll get very far on sixteen grand, Alexei,” Davi said.

“I’ll get far enough.”

Alexei caught Davi’s gaze.

“You’ll find yourself in prison before too long,” Davi said.

“Sergei,” Alexei turned, “give me a cigarette.”

Sergei tossed him a cigarette and a lighter.

“You ever get the feeling that you’re caught up in something that just keeps circling and circling and never gets to the point? That we’re all sort of doomed? That none of this makes sense? That people are complete and utter failures when it comes to simple human decency?

That no one gives a shit about anyone else if it doesn’t directly affect them?”

“Where did that come from? Who are you to have a moral discussion?” Sergei laughed.

“You don’t get it,” Alexei said. “I am the person to have moral discussions.”

Sergei laughed and put his fist under his chin and assumed a mock-expression of brooding thought.

“Shut up,” Davi said to him. “You are a fool, Sergei. Alexei may be a scoundrel, but he is a wise man.”

“What? Why am I a fool? I don’t get it.” 97

“You probably never will,” Alexei said, “because you are a fool.”

98

The Writer

Akron, Ohio. November, 2013.

The writer awoke from dreams of joining the Wobblies. Not the defunct, spasmodic

Wobblies of his day but the booming, audacious IWW of the early 20th century. Black and white photos, Bill Haywood, the Industrial Congress, strikes and police brutality, picket lines, 40,000 strong. In the dream he’d been on a platform shouting to a throng of workers, wearing a tailored brown morning coat, complete with pocket watch and handkerchief. He gripped the lapels of it with pride and beamed at the audience. But the words he said had faded into the ether of the early morning and the writer’s eyes opened and all he had in his mind for a moment was the red and black emblem of the IWW zooming away in the darkness.

There was a dog barking down the street, loud and in a cascading cycle of “bark, bark, howl.” The writer put a pillow over his head to block out the sound. He muttered, half-asleep,

“Someone should murder that dog.” He couldn’t fall back asleep so he got up and walked to his living room. A friend from his writing program had been by the night before, and he’d left a snifter of brandy on the coffee table. The writer sipped it and turned on his computer. His novel blinked to life.

M had called off work the day before and they’d stayed in together, making love and watching cartoons and cleaning their apartment. She’d gone to her parents later that evening and he left to go put in his hours at the pizzeria. She put their laundry in a basket and kissed his cheek and told him that sometimes he was just the sweetest guy she’d ever met and that she’d be back on Saturday and wished him luck on his novel. The writer kissed her and told her that she made 99 him feel happy and waved to her from the doorstep, watching her descend the stairway, smiling back at him underneath that quaff of blue hair.

The writer grabbed a stack of his student’s papers and turned on a game. The game was set in a hyperbolic fictional version of Los Angeles. The player was a criminal. The city was a machine. Complete with automated pedestrians, compact feelings, soundbytes, radio DJ’s, aeroplanes, and socio-political discord. A microcosm of the world at large. The humor was tawdry and puerile, the writing was sardonic and brilliant.

The writer made a few sandwiches with some peanut butter and set some Ramen noodles to boil.

He cupped his balls when he masturbated and folded his laundry when it was clean and did his taxes when they were due.

A person like any other.

The semester was halfway over. He’d quit the warehouse job while M had got hired on.

The decision to move in together unfolded like a synapse. The writer got work at a pizza shop and they split the rent and utilities. The writer waited on customers and smoked thinly rolled joints with the head cook after work – burning his fingers on plates straight out of the oven.

They’d unpacked the last of their things that week, playing music and dancing to records and mp3s. M talked a lot about how much she loved all the natural light they got. The writer had said he liked the hardwood floors and that they didn’t have to pay for heat. M told him that Fall was her favorite season and he agreed with her. The writer went out and bought some beer and drank it with M. They made love in the kitchen, and afterwards, she went to her room and went to bed because she had to get up early for work and the writer stayed up and worked on his novel, smoking cigarettes and sipping vodka that he liked to call “wodka.” 100

Their original settling-in coincided with the writer starting his teaching hours at Uni. He was teaching a composition course again and he used the same books for the course that he had before. It was a triple entente of Howl, Huxley, and Less Than Zero. The semester would follow a familiar pattern of students not understanding Howl, much less how to talk about it, and the writer becoming excited by his own interpretations of the work – reading it aloud, taking a breath at the right pause, lifting his voice and throwing the words out to them – unabashed and naked –

“trembling before other skeletons.” Some boring MLA lessons and the writer struggling to explain what a claim is to people who seem to not understand the concept. A transition into

Brave New World and the mid-semester fatigue sets in, but questions of love and meaning, suffering and depth, good and evil all swimming around the room, bristling past the sleepy students and jolting them awake. Consequences of the First World. Then Ellis would come in and wake everyone up, perhaps more awake than they’ve ever been, and the students – the ones who paid attention – would realize that they love stories. The ones who’d been sleeping wish they’d paid attention and kicked themselves for skipping class and being on their phone all the time. The writer loved it. Tedium be damned. Talking to young people about books and what they said about our world – it made him high, like some kind of ephemeral spirit of the literati.

A large wooden dining table that the writer had found on the street graced the dining room, a coffee table with acerbic paintings done on it by M’s sister was in the living room. They had a record player, some outdated video game consoles, a bookshelf, a TV, a sofa, and a veritable cornucopia of small owl statues. M collected them. A porcelain plaque adorned with three cartoonish owls, speckled with shimmering confetti, and the words “Welcome to Our

Home,” hung on the door to M’s room. M let the writer use one hawkish looking bird as a 101 bookend. The writer liked it and would look over to it gracing the space next to his top shelf books.

M came home from work with a gift certificate for $50 of ham from a local grocer. Her packing rate had been so high that she’d received the hambonus as compensation. The writer made jokes about hamboning.

“You feast on that ham, M. You earned it.”

M opened a beer.

“How was your day?” she asked.

“It was okay,” the writer said. “I’ve been trying to work on my novel. And I graded a few papers.” He yawned. “You wanna watch Aqua Teen?”

They watched Aqua Teen.

Several beers later, they were talking and ignoring the show and the listless stories of the

“Cybernetic Ghost of Christmas Past from the Future.”

M sat back and lit a cigarette and smiled at him. “I’m gonna tell you a story,” she said.

“One time during the winter I lost control of my car in this neighborhood where I was going to a friend’s house for the first time. The road was all snowy and I accidentally slid up into this yard and when I tried to pull back onto the road the car got stuck in the snow and my tires started spinning and just digging into the fucking ground and ripping up all this grass and mud. So I turned the wheel, but all that did was spin the ass-end of the car around. So now I’m like doing donuts in this front yard – I must have been stuck like that for at least five minutes – and as the car turned to face the house the fifth or six time around I see this family just watching me at the window. They were all just standing there watching me totally fuck up their yard with this 102 amazed look on their faces and I just kind of like waved to them and kept doing what I was doing and I eventually pulled out and back onto the road. When I got back onto the road, I realized the house I was going to was right across the street.”

M showed the writer a video on YouTube of her and her friends in a room in a cellar in

2009. The walls were concrete and the floor was covered in broken glass. M stood, hair black, face fuller than the writer had seen before, wearing a black winter peacoat and holding a long fluorescent lightbulb. Moby, who was off camera and yelling commands, tells M how to properly hit their friend David across the back with the bulb. A visibly drunk M sidles up next to

David. She takes aim but swings the bulb from the hip. It connects and shatter across David’s lower back. David yells in pain and then bursts into laughter. The camera tilts wildly, slipping sideways, and M says, “Ih’m sorry I messed up!” and the video ends.

There was something brilliant about her. Something he couldn’t quite convey in words.

He’d tried before. “You’re someone I feel like I’m supposed to know. Like, I’m supposed to learn something from you. That we’ll always be friends. I don’t have many friends. I’ve always been that way. I have one or two close friends, but even some of them fall by the wayside. D is the only friend I had that stayed by my side. I feel like you’re important like he’s important to me. You’re my friend, M. I’ll always be here for ya’.”

103

*

December, 2013. Akron, Ohio.

The writer kicked the snow off his shoes and shut the door. It was cold and dark outside.

He could hear the wind whip against the redbrick, howling in the courtyard.

“M?” he called out.

Mail littered their dinner table. They used a bed sheet as a tablecloth.

The writer took off his jacket and hung it on a chair by the table. He could hear water running. There was a voice too. Singing. Alto in pitch. Filled with a tremulous manic wonder – a joyous fullness. It rose above the air and filled the heart with a raw sense of audacious pride. It wounded and beckoned.

The writer strained to hear what she was saying as he approached the bathroom door. He realized she was singing the notes of the melody. Then the words came – loud and filled with an obscure piety.

“Who's in a bunker? Who's in a bunker? Women and children first. And the children first. And the children…I'll laugh until my head comes off. I'll swallow till I burst. Until I burst. Until I – Ice age coming. Ice age coming. Let me hear both sides. Let me hear both sides. Let me hear both. Ice age coming. Ice age coming. Throw him in that fire. Throw it in that fire.”

He called out to her.

“Hey, M?”

The singing stopped.

“Yeah?”

“I’m home.”

He heard her pull back the shower curtain.

“I’ll be out in a minute,” she said. 104

The sound of the water stopped. The pipes rattled and shook the building.

The writer sat down on the couch.

He had never heard that song before – that was how it seemed. And he had never known her voice until he had heard her sing. He felt beholden to it. A voice like that is the kind of shit you read about, not something that confronts you in your life – and he did not know how to feel about that.

It made him think about Calvinism and Providence.

He shuddered and chuckled. Felt nervous.

All the same. He had something to say.

How it made him feel.

On good days, he would call her Emmy-Bear or Pookie. She would call him Peanut and, sometimes, DJ P-nutty. Said his skin was the color of a roasted one.

On bad days, they’d cry by themselves and then be hungry together.

The writer lit a cigarette.

M came out of the bedroom hallway wearing a frumpy orange sweater and purple shorts.

She was toweling her blue hair dry. He motioned for her to come sit with him.

“M,” he said looking at her. “I have no idea what I’m doing with my life. I write and I talk about books. I hawk pizzas and sodas and fucking chicken wings.”

“You teach.” M smiled.

“Teaching is great, but it’s hard to see your measure when you’re a teacher. You can’t see it in front of you - your effect, I mean. You can’t see it objectively. You- You have a gift. That voice of yours – I can’t explain. It’s the kind of voice you hear in a dream. It’s a voice made for songs.” 105

M blushed and tussled his hair.

“You’re a good writer,” she said.

“You’re a beautiful singer,” he said.

“When you come home from work, you smell like a mozzarella stick. I like it. It smells good.”

The writer laughed.

M looked down.

“I should tell you, they told me not to come back to work tomorrow,” she said. “They’re laying people off. They fired a bunch of us all at once.”

“I’m sorry, M. Don’t- don’t let the bastards get you down.”

The writer saw it in his mind – the floor managers called people off each line and took them into the office area, all of them filing past a yellow and black banner which read,

“Welcome to Awesomeville!” The managers stood in a straight line in the front of the room.

They waited for everyone to take a seat and they told the workers that their services were no longer needed and they were not to come back to work tomorrow – they explained that demand was not high enough and all the work they currently needed could be done by the remaining employees. The people delivering this message had clipboards and pens. They were frumpy and middle-aged, dressed in striped button up shirts with short sleeves or long floral pattern skirts and jean jackets. There were mustaches, perms, pleated pants, and wristwatches. Some of them wore glasses. Some of them were between two jobs themselves, but none of them were fired and that gave them a distinct advantage in this conversation. There was probably one worker who slammed a table with his fists, made obscene remarks. There were definitely a few who got on 106 their phones to call for rides – others who started to call staffing agencies for more work. A few buried their faces in their hands and cried.

107

*

January, 2014. Akron, Ohio.

The writer laced up his shoes and tapped his pockets to make sure he had his cigarettes.

He was running late for work at the restaurant.

It had snowed again the night before and he needed to dig his car out of the pile left by the plow and all he had to dig his car out with was a plastic broom. He started to pull the broom out from the backseat of his car when he felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. The caller ID read,

“Pops.”

A text message was there.

“Hey, dad,” he said.

“Hey, son.”

A car passed by, throwing up slush.

“What’s up?” the writer texted back.

“This may seem like an odd question but are you making comments politically that would make people think you are supportive of communism? I certainly hope (1/3) not for many reasons. But for you, this could significantly impact your job opportunities. From other aspects it is oppressive and has never been or wi(2/3)il be successful. I hope you are wiser and will be more prudent on what you write.”

Not just things on the internet, he wanted to tell him.

The writer stood there looking at the text.

“I’ll call you later,” he wrote. 108

The writer drove to work feeling anxious, smoke from his cigarette drifting into his eye.

His heart hurt. His head hurt. The palpitations in his chest, heart beating, pressingon his spleen – he felt sick. His innards so much psychosomatic truth.

He loved his father but it was a hard love. A true love – forged of blunt truth and burning honesty.

Words that wrote themselves.

A Republican-voting some-kind-of-Libertarian debating a quasi-anarchistic, revolution advocating, anti-capitalist twenty-something know-nothing who spends his time writing and doing nothing but sit on his ass and “snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom” all day. A kid who, while doing his best to play the game and keep his head above water nevertheless ends up flailing like a fool when the economy turns bad.

“Don’t jump ship!” his father would say.

“Right, like I’m staying onboard when we cause the storm.”

And the writer would jump into the icy depths, ready for whatever come what may.

The writer hates being a waiter and the waiter hates being a writer.

Food doesn’t serve itself and when you have five tables and more waiting and drinks to get and orders to take to make a lousy $2-$5 dollars a table, you don’t care much about who these people are, or their role in the struggle. They’re just there – because you get fired if you don’t move so you can’t stop. You can’t eat food – let alone food you can’t afford more than one day out of the week. Your gums hurt because you’re a dumb writer who drinks too much and smokes cigarettes and fantasizes about the coming insurrection.

109

“Dad-” he says, cut short by bad reception.

“Hey, how are you son?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“How was work?”

“Not terrible. It wasn’t bad. I didn’t make much.”

“Listen, I didn’t mean to sound- well, saying that you’re supporting Communism – that isn’t true is it? You aren’t posting stuff like that are you? Because if you are, I’d be pretty disappointed for a lot of reasons. First, it’s been historically violent and oppressive. Second, it just goes against human nature. Third, you should be very careful what you post online. This is the kind of thing that can keep you from getting a job.”

“Well-” isn’t that fucked up? is what he wanted to ask.

“Having liberal views is one thing...” his father trailed off, “but nothing is wrong with capitalism.”

“Well, I-”

“Capitalism can generate more wealth than any other system.”

At the expense of workers, the writer thought.

“It may not be perfect, but it’s the best system we have,” his father said.

That’s what the Monarchists said about the Monarchies, the writer thought. And what did the Mohicans say about capitalism? How about the Sioux and the Onondaga?

“Dad, I don’t want you to think I’m some kind of Stalinist or anything, but-”

“Are you a communist?” his father asked. “That’s my question, because, if you are, I mean – I wouldn’t exactly want to talk to you. I mean, I’ll still talk to you, but not about politics.

You’re my son and I love you. But – communism isn’t something, just- please think about it.” 110

The writer paused.

He thought, for a moment, about quoting Marx.

Talk about the struggle. Talk about the agents of historical change. Talk about the exploiting class. Tell your dad you love him.

“Dad, look at Native American society – it wasn’t capitalist. It was a successful system. It provided for people. It didn’t destroy the earth.”

“Capitalism may have flaws, but there’s no reason to think that those flaws are… look,” he said, “people are greedy. They’re greedy and selfish and small minded. Socialism and communism would never work. Do I think poor people should have a safety net? Sure. Do I think charity is a good thing? Sure. Is it terrible that charity is necessary, with all the wealth and resources there are in the world? Absolutely. Does poverty and suffering bother me? You bet.

But there’s no reason to say that all that is capitalism’s fault. There will always be greedy and corrupt people – especially in government. No system is free from that.”

No system is free.

So, protect this system, because it’s the best we have – never mind the slaves that make our clothes and shoes, the servants the reap our crops, the teamsters that haul our cargo, the men and women who package and slave and expire under the weight of demand – perspiring and hoping for some kind of break. Working until their fingers are numb. Cheating to get a little bit ahead. Lying on their resumes. Spending what they had left on groceries.

“If people were too greedy and competitive to live in a communist system,” the writer said, “why on earth would anyone think that private charity would be enough to care for the poor? Too greedy for socialism, but not too greedy for socialism. And if governments are inherently corrupt, then why shouldn’t people try to transition into a classless, stateless society? 111

Doesn’t it have to happen at some point? Dad, in a way, you’re getting at what Marx originally said. The greatest agent of change throughout history has been class struggle.”

His dad paused.

“There is no class struggle,” he said.

“What?” the writer asked.

“Class struggle is something people make up to justify being lazy. Anyone can make it in this society – if you work hard enough. If you keep trying and really mean it.”

The writer paused.

“If you work hard enough?”

“If you work hard enough-”

“I’ve seen people work plenty hard and get jack-dick for it,” the writer said. “Don’t-”

“Sometimes circumstances-”

“If everyone can ‘make it,’ why on earth would we need a ‘social safety net’?”

“People fall through the cracks. The system isn’t perfect.”

“The system eats people to get stronger, dad.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Workers compete for jobs – jobs that are temporary. People are the mortar used to fill the cracks in the system.”

“Communism doesn’t solve anything.”

“Okay.”

“People have a right to what they own.”

“But dad, ownership – like, what is a stock?”

“Communism isn’t-” 112

“A stock is a certificate of ownership in something that’s real. This society rests on the backs or workers-”

“No one has the right to take another man’s-”

“Private property isn’t about ‘ownership’ – it’s about benefit. It’s about-”

“Socialism and Communism are unnatural.”

The writer sighed.

“Okay, dad.”

“I’m sorry, son. I don’t want to argue with you. I just want you to think. Be more conscious of what you say online – it could keep you from getting work.”

“Okay,” he said. “I will.”

It was cold outside. It was snowing. The writer couldn’t go inside until his father said goodbye. 113

*

Structure meant stasis and stasis meant death – in life and in prose.

*

Like a shark that stops moving or a dolphin that doesn't come up for air.

*

Steps only lead to a ledge, and from there, a drop. 114

*

That night, after work, he had a horrifying nightmare.

In it, he would find himself in a classroom watching a film of irreducible white, so bright he had to shield his eyes. The man in charge – a burly fellow in a yellow polo shirt tucked into pleated khaki pants and stretched over his paunch, with gray hair and a salt and pepper mustache and a coach’s whistle around his neck – would hand him a credit card.

It was understood that the writer knew this man and that he was to purchase gifts for this man’s son.

The writer would leave the room and walk into the city outside. Rows of brown houses, compressed together – doleful windows adorning their faces. It was dark and Dickensian and no place to feel solace.

He suddenly found himself being followed by a white faced young man with black hair.

The young man was dragging a pale canvas sack. He would tell the writer to place half of the presents in the bag and half of them in a nearby bush. The writer would place the square red boxes with silver ribbons into the bag and nestle the others into the nearby bush.

Back in the classroom.

An acquaintance of his, a faceless person he knew in high school, would be reading from a computer screen – his face glowing in its light. He would seem nervous and he would say,

“It can be seen in the writing that the writer is a scared individual. Even more clearly, it can be seen that he doesn’t like himself. He is full of self-doubt and hesitation. He is also afraid that people will not like him and that feeling follows him wherever he goes. He wants to run away from his problems and he hates people. He is, on a certain level, a sociopath – cold, unfeeling, and completely removed from the social reality around him. He bides his time with 115 little to no plans for his future. People come and go in his life and he often finds himself alone – pushing people away by the very nature of his person. He is, to put it simply, a failure.”

The writer would stand up.

“What are you reading?” he would yell.

“Besides his anti-social qualities and self-doubt – he is hostile to his reader. He is an unkempt barber who doesn’t even know how to shave himself.”

The writer would run up behind the figure and look at the computer screen – it’s iridescent glow illuminating their faces in the pale light of the classroom. There would be a multitude of animated sheep jumping around on the screen, a scant view of the document behind them.

“What do you mean?” the writer would ask him.

The speaker’s tone had been oddly displaced. Curious. Removed – as if satire.

The writer would ask him “Are you sure?” more than once.

The next moment, they would be outside. Rain would be falling. They would be wearing raincoats, facing each other, prepared to come to blows.

They would fight.

In the fight, their limbs would clash. Their eyes: bulged.

The rain would mix with their blood – blows landing and leaving hollow feelings that burned and never properly healed.

The writer would best him and push him to the ground, punching him.

“You don’t understand anything,” his enemy would croak.

The writer would punch him again and again and again and again.

Punched him until the writer started to cry full tears of hate and sorrow and regret. 116

Punched him until he stopped moving.

The writer would see himself walking away from the lifeless body of his adversary.

Blood would stain a yellow raincoat and pool in the wet grass – spreading down the rain soaked hill.

The writer would wake up.

M is unlocking the door.

The writer would cry.

M would ask him what was wrong. Tell him to calm down.

“I had a horrible nightmare,” he would say.

“What happened?”

She sat down on the foldout bed next to him.

“I had a nightmare.”

She wiped a tear from his eye.

“What happened?”

“I liked Cecil. He was never mean to me,” he nestled into M’s arms.

“It was just a dream,” she said, stroking his hair. “You’re okay now. What happened?”

“Why did I dream that?” The writer paused. “I’m scared,” he said. “I am scared, M. I’m scared of being a writer.”

“You’re a great writer,” she said.

“Why did I kill him?”

“It was just a dream. You didn’t kill anybody.”

He began to cry again.

“I don’t hate people,” he said. 117

“Some people are – look, you’re a good person,” M said.

She paused.

“I don’t want to be alone,” he said.

“You’re not alone,” she said, and she hugged him.

“I’m not alone,” he said, holding her tight.

118

*

Reality, the writer concluded, was bullshit.

*

119

Black Dolphin – Chapter II

Alain & Lola

May, 2004. Los Angeles, California.

Alain was naked on the bed lying on his back. The lights near the camera hurt his eyes and they felt hot on his skin. He wanted to put his robe back on and go out onto the terrace to smoke a cigarette but he had to wait until Bernie got the shot, which meant he had to wait until the fluffer got Jean-Luc hard again.

“We’re losing daylight,” Bernie said, focusing the lens of the camera. “And these bulbs aren’t powerful enough.” He scratched his beard.

“I want to go smoke, Jean-Luc. Let’s finish this already.”

“Give me a minute, I’m just getting into it.” Jean-Luc put his hand on the back of the girl’s head and started moving with her rhythm, holding her dirty blonde ponytail like a handle.

After a few moments he moaned, and Alain rolled his eyes. They finished the scene and Alain went out and smoked a cigarette on the terrace and called his agent downtown. Hot air was blowing in from the desert again.

“You got Lyle, talk to me,” his agent said.

“I need to get out of L.A.,” Alain said. “You have to get me out of L.A.”

Lyle paused. “What’s wrong, Alain?”

“I’m going mad here, Lyle.”

“Are they forcing you to do anything against your will?”

Alain thought about it. “No, they aren’t forcing me to do anything against my will.” 120

“What’s wrong, Alain?”

“I just want to go back.”

“Go back? To New York?”

“To anywhere.”

After the shoot, Bernie and the sound guy packed up the equipment while Alain and Jean-

Luc and the fluffer girl, who said her name was Michelle, went down to the lobby and then out into the street and hailed a cab. It was raining and all the people outside had their heads down and their collars turned up. Michelle was wearing a beige trench coat that was too big for her and

Alain couldn’t help but think that she was lost inside of it – being swallowed up by the folds.

They went to a bar on Hollywood Boulevard that had these small glass lanterns on the tables and

Chinese lanterns strung around the ceiling.

Michelle drank her champagne in slow sips. She was talking about her modeling career.

Alain watched the flames in the lanterns flicker and move. Jean-Luc asked Michelle how old she was and she said she was nineteen but asked them not to tell anyone.

“I still tell them I’m eighteen,” she said. “My agent told me that they’ll keep you around longer that way.”

Alain looked at Jean-Luc and Jean-Luc’s face was flushed and smiling. Alain looked back to the girl.

“Why do you want to be a model?” he asked her.

She lit a cigarette and pursed her lips.

“Because I want to be famous,” she said.

Alain nodded and turned to watch the cars and people on the boulevard and he thought about the first night that he and Jean-Luc made love in the hotel room in Barcelona and started to 121 feel a little lightheaded. He ordered another drink and kept saying to himself that he had to get out of L.A. before it was too late and Jean-Luc kept asking him “Too late for what?” – a cracked grin on his face.

122

*

Lola Lanahan was sitting in her penthouse on Hollywood Boulevard. The sharp electric tang of fluorescent light stung her eyes and perfumed fragrance burned her nose. She pulled a small round mirror from her purse, placed it on her bureau, and found a razor blade in the drawer. She turned an orange medicine bottle upside down over the mirror. A big white rock tumbled out. She cut off a chunk and chopped it into pieces. She slid the razor through it, morphing the tiny pile into a thick, bold line which she snorted it up her nose through a one- hundred dollar bill.

Cold motion trickled through her face – soft spots of light faded in and out of her vision.

She looked at herself in the large oval mirror above the bureau and felt a little blinded by the light in the big fluorescent globes. The cocaine was dripping down into her throat and she kept swallowing but her mouth was dry and she couldn’t escape the taste. She felt like some sort of beautiful, superhuman sieve. She pouted her lips and blew herself a kiss. She winked and smiled.

Her hair looked better bleached, she decided. She’d stick with it, for a while at least.

There was a letter on the counter from her mother. It had been there for days, unopened.

Lola picked it up and looked at it for a moment before throwing it in the trash.

Her phone vibrated. She picked it up and saw that it was Barry. She stabbed the phone with her finger.

“What, Barry?” she asked.

His voice was all traffic noise.

“Where are you?” he cried. “You were supposed to be downtown an hour ago. I’ve got photographers and set designers freaking the fuck out.” 123

“I had to stop at home first.” Lola dabbed her finger on the end of a line and gummed it.

“The Independent Reflex people are all here – they’ve been here! Where are you? Why haven’t you been answering your phone? Get your ass down here! I can’t stall them forever.”

“Tell them that I got lost on the highway or something,” she said. “I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

“They know you live in L.A. For God’s sake, Lola -”

“Shut up Barry and figure something out! You’re my goddamn agent, that’s what I pay you for!”

She hung up, did another line of coke and then called a taxi.

124

*

Alain waited for Jean-Luc at the café. The black glazed mug in his hand reflected his face back to him. He looked around. It was still early morning. There were a few old ladies walking around with oversized purses. The streets were quiet. Quiet and dirty. The coffee was too sweet and he drank it too quickly. He lit a cigarette.

Today, he was leaving.

The cigarette smoke floated up into the air – a thin spiral.

“Alain Habish,” a high, boyish voice said. Alain turned. It was Jean-Luc. He had a red motorcycle helmet in his hand and a jean jacket draped around his shoulders. His flossy blonde hair glowed in the sun.

“I’m glad to see you started wearing the helmet.”

“Oh,” he glanced at it, “I suppose I did, didn’t I?” He sat down and put the helmet on the table. “I have a meeting with Bernie and Lyle in two hours,” he checked his watch, “what did you want to discuss? You sounded upset.”

“Jean-Luc, you’ve been in this business longer than I have. I think you can help me.”

Alain put his cigarette out. “I want to get out. I want to act.”

Jean-Luc smiled. “But Alain, you act. You are an actor.”

“I want to be a real actor. No more pornographic movies. Real film. Art. Something beyond all the fluff.”

Jean-Luc paused. “You’re very good at what you do,” he said.

The waiter walked up and Jean-Luc shushed him away.

“I want to be a real actor, Jean-Luc. You know people in Hollywood. You talk of them – you can help me. You can help me get in.” Alain touched Jean-Luc’s hand and held it. “Get me 125 an audition. Anything. Set me up here in Hollywood, please. I have to get out. I’m sick of this life.”

“What about your contract?” Jean-Luc asked, lighting a cigarette and crossing his legs.

“I don’t care,” Alain said. “I’m no one’s property. Help me get away. I know you have money, rich friends.”

Jean-Luc smiled. His teeth were perfect white squares.

“I remember when I met you in Paris,” Jean-Luc said. “You asked me the same things.

You wanted this life. This career. You wanted all this.”

“I don’t want it anymore. I’ve grown tired of it.”

“How droll,” Jean-Luc said. “You’re like a charming little boy, you know? Full of cliché ambition.”

“Are you going to help me or not?”

“Okay, Alain. I was bored anyway,” Jean-Luc said, stabbing out his cigarette on the glass table. “I’ll call around tomorrow.”

“Today,” Alain said, “I want you to call today.”

126

*

Traffic was at a crawl. The sun was blinding and the heat was unbearable. Lola took her foot off the break and the car inched forward. The pace was agonizing.

Her phone began to vibrate.

Lola flicked her cigarette out the window and answered her phone.

“What do you want, Mom?” she said.

“Hi Lola, it’s been a while. How are you?” Her mother’s voice was tremulous, like it always was.

“I’m driving, Mom,” Lola said.

Traffic was at a standstill.

“Oh, well, if you can’t talk that’s okay. I sent you a letter. Did you get it?”

Lola said nothing.

Her mother started again, “I talked to your lawyer today.”

“And?”

“It’s done – the paperwork, I mean. You’re on your own now.”

“Yeah? I’ve been on my own,” Lola said.

“I know but now it’s official. Your father and I wish- well, I just want you to know that we love you and that we care about you and that we don’t want anything bad to happen to you or for Hollywood to change you – and well, I know you aren’t a child anymore – I just wish you would listen to us sometimes and do what we tell you. We want what’s best for you. We want to help you.”

Lola said nothing.

“Lola?” 127

“As long as you guys aren’t copping 10% and telling me what shitty films to do and keeping me away from my money, I’m happy,” she hung up and lit another cigarette.

“Fucking traffic,” she said.

She knew her mother was calling from the kitchen in the squat little non-descript single story ranch on a ugly flat street in Branville, Minnesota. Tiny front yard, modest hedge, shuttered windows, brown cabinets, yellow wallpaper, off-white linoleum, beige carpet. Sad looking windows and handmade molding.

Lola lit a cigarette.

She thought about home. That didn’t mean much anymore now that “home” was alone in her penthouse or at a party on La Cienega Boulevard or eating dinner at Spago with a casting director. Blonde shirtless boys in sunglasses, swarthy drug dealers in fedoras, dimpled girls in miniskirts and lace gloves, all of it miles away from Branville’s boring red brick houses and pine cone forests. She’d left after months of planning, swearing to herself: No more dreaming of flights to L.A. No more safe-picks. No more watchful-eyes. To gain her freedom, a change was necessary. L.A. should be hers – and it was just lying in wait, ready for the taking.

Time, she knew, was running out.

She’d left her parent’s home in Branville over a year ago, saving up $7,000 from a dead- end cashier job and paying a taxi to ferry her to the airport under the cover of the northern night.

The pale corners of the home, moonlit, falling beckoned her. She stepped around the creaks in the floor – all of those pressure points rendering a stillness to her escape. It was only when she reached the foyer that the stillness was interrupted and she saw her little brother standing at the end of the causeway. They held each other’s gaze before Lola broke free from it, saying, “Tell

Mom and Dad not to look for me.” 128

When people in L.A. would ask her about her parents, Lola would describe her father as a quiet, paunchy man who let her mother deal with most of the fuss. When it came to money though, he took a zealous interest. “So, how much is this going to cost?” was practically his catch-phrase. He was perpetually suspicious of the pony-tailed talent agents who tried to put his daughter in bikinis, and then have her photographed and displayed for any Tom-Dick-and-Harry to see. Money was important but his daughter’s vestal nature was sacrosanct.

Her mother she’d describe as a meticulous sort of person who always left twenty minutes early before going anywhere and hated merging on the highway. The woman would also burst into tears at the simplest of things, like losing a checkbook or forgetting to buy stamps at the post office. She’d refuse to leave the house until someone else took care of it – her voice tremulous and cracking, her door shut and locked. Placid moments interrupted by a flurry of rotting emotions that did nothing but make Lola sick.

But Lola didn’t stay hungry. She broke the chains and freed the birds. She waitressed, she stripped; she became a stunt double and fell through ten floors of fake masonry – stuck her head through a breakaway pane of safety glass. She withered on the vine of Hollywood but found her break in the world of commercials and extra-appearances – playing young girls in hospital gowns, passengers on the subway, manic pixie girl walk-ons. This was how she met Barry and it was Barry who picked her out for the big-break audition. The show had been called, How to

Date my Daughter, and much to her surprise, she got the part. The sitcom got picked up by a major network, ran for a season, and then a central cast member died of a brain aneurysm and the show entered syndication on a few of the lesser networks after almost immediately being cancelled.

Barry, Lola thought, is a hawkish sort of man. 129

Barry looked for sweet, innocent looking girls with a certain kind of “je ne sais quoi,” took pictures of them and spread the best photos around studio lots, leaving them with his friends and contacts. He liked young girls like so much fresh meat and the studios loved him for it.

Lola had called him a “pinprick of a man” when she sat down for her casting interview with him.

Barry told her that he loved her spirit and that she was hired.

Lola told him, “That’s what I thought.”

130

*

Alain was walking down Sunset when his phone rang. It was Jean-Luc. He had an audition lined up for him at four.

“Give your I.D. to the guard and he’ll let you in and tell you where to go,” Jean-Luc said.

“What’s it for?” Alain asked.

“A commercial. Short notice. Don’t worry, I’ll have more for you in a day or two.”

Alain hailed a taxi and told the driver to take him to a “burger joint” for lunch. When the driver asked which one, Alain told him, “Whichever is closest.”

“How about Mike’s Place? It’s just down the road.”

Jean-Luc had told him about the restaurant when they’d been in Paris last summer. Alain nodded and the taxi driver took off into traffic.

At Mike’s, he ordered the “Wham-Burger w/ a side of Wasabi Fries.” He was sorely disappointed when he started to eat. He told the waiter this.

“The burger tastes like it was frozen ten minutes ago and these fries are making me sick,” he said.

The waiter rolled his eyes and apologized with the enthusiasm of someone who makes

$2.13 an hour.

Alain left a dollar tip after the waiter told him he’d be unable to refund his purchase.

The sun was lolling over L.A. It’s glare pierced the still blue of the sky. The city roared like a paper tiger and Alain felt nothing when he looked at the vagary of buildings around him.

He thought that he should feel awe, reverence, a sense of his place within the chaos of the world.

All he felt was the draught of the desert and the hot air that ushered across the city, carrying with it the incessant howls of the starving coyotes that scavenged on the banks of the L.A. River. 131

He put on his sunglasses and sighed.

After lunch, Alain walked to the mall and started talking to a guy working at a sunglasses boutique who looked like he was in his early twenties. The young man said he was a screenwriter from Maui and that he was in a band called “Empty Vessels.” He was wearing a tight white t- shirt that said “Fuck you” on it and a pair of faded jeans. His hair was swept to the side and Alain thought it suited him. The young man said his name was Mark.

Alain touched his hand and whispered into his ear that he was a beautiful boy and that he’d love to take him home and keep him there. The young man blushed. He didn’t talk much more about Maui, but he had a lot to say about Hollywood and wanting to break into the movie business. Alain told him that he was in movies himself and Mark looked at him with rapt attention.

He gave the guy his number and bought a pair of pitch black sunglasses for $175. He thought the glasses made him look like a hired killer and he liked the feeling. He wore them out of the mall and people eyed him – suspicions surrounding the swarthy and old white women pantomiming unconcerned nonchalance. Afterwards he caught another cab to the studio where his audition was.

The studio was a concrete soundstage with hot lights and pale backdrops erected in various corners of the building. There were fifteen or sixteen guys exactly Alain’s height and build, several of his complexion, roughly all the same age, standing in a big line inside the set of the studio. There were wires and naked walls and collapsible sets that looked like teenage bedrooms and salty Irish pubs. 132

“Now,” said one of the casting directors, “I want you all to bring something of yourself to the piece. Show us the real you. Say the lines, drink the soda, and smile as if you were smiling at your lover.”

The scene was simple: a group of friends at a party are having fun, dancing to music, and someone shows up with an ice bucket full of a smooth, dark, effervescent cola. Each actor takes one from the bucket and the camera zooms in on the only speaking role, the sound narrowing, cutting out the din of the party, and the actor looks at the camera and says, “Ah! That’s the real thing.”

Most of the guys played the part wrong. Their acting was like a poem that told you what every metaphor meant. It was as if Alain was watching them awkwardly try to fellate themselves with words – masturbatory acting which reminded you of the construction at hand.

It wasn’t as bad as porn, but his stomach felt heavy anyway.

His judges sat at a long table watching him. The mood was stale. Alain watched them sip their lattes, wipe their mustaches and scratch their goatees. They stroked their pony-tails and tapped their pens against the table and he started to read and they sat up in their seats, letting his words fizz in their ears.

133

*

May, 2004. Los Angeles, California.

The valet at Ma Maison took Lola’s car and she told him not to scratch it because she thought it sounded like what rich people would say.

Barry was inside with a booth already. He’d waited to order, which she thought was sweet.

It was crowded inside. A phalanx of hungry patrons were eating and squealing with redundant nonsense. Money flowed from them. Lola thought they all looked stupid in their cheap suits and Sunday dresses.

Food was overpriced and no one was paying for the service.

A waiter in a white shirt and black tie rushed over.

“Thank you for dining with us tonight,” he said. “May I get you something to drink?”

“A Mimosa for me, please,” Lola said.

“Whiskey on the rocks, and be generous,” Barry said.

Lola looked at the menu but didn’t feel hungry and set it down.

“Independent Reflex is behind the picture,” Barry said, thumbing the menu. His comb- over was half convincing. “It’s an art film and they’d be delighted to have you as its star. Roger said you’re perfect.”

“How much?” Lola said, taking a drink of Redbull.

“It’s low budget. Independently produced.”

“How much, Barry?”

“About $7,000,” he sneezed. “$6,500 after tax.” He shrank back from her.

“What’s it about?” Lola asked. 134

“It’s about a girl who comes to Hollywood to make it big.”

“Is that it?”

“Of course that’s not it.”

“What’s it called?” she asked.

“Black Dolphin,” he said.

“What’s that mean? Who’s the male lead?”

“We’re looking.”

“Looking for what?”

The waiter arrived with their drinks.

“Sir, Miss, are you ready to place an order?”

“I’m not hungry,” Lola said.

“May I recommend the beef tartar, served with a fricassee of wild mushrooms which comes in a thick, red wine sauce? Or perhaps you would prefer some tender pheasant coated in

Dijon mustard? Maybe the saffron lamb chops served with herbs and greens and a side of balsamic vinaigrette.”

“I’ll take the lamb chops,” Barry said. “Lola, babes, you sure you don’t want anything?”

He pointed to himself with his thumbs. “It’s on me.”

“No, thank you.”

She handed the waiter her menu.

Barry sighed.

“You were talking about the movie,” Lola said.

“Yeah, so it’s about these actor kids who meet up. They struggle to make it big. They fall in love. It’s uplifting. Cinéma vérité. Very tasteful.” 135

“Any sex in it?”

“Funny you mention that. This film is breaking new ground, Lola. It’ll put you on the map.”

“On the map how?”

“On the map like being a part of film history.”

Lola looked at Barry. Sometimes she thought he looked like the walrus from Alice in

Wonderland, always prattling on about whatever it was he talked about, “cabbages and kings” or whatever.

“Cut to the chase, Barry. How’s it gonna make film history?” Lola crossed her arms and looked down her nose at him.

“Sex,” Barry said. “Sex is how. It’s going to be the first mass market film to have a real, bona-fide sex scene, and you’re going to star in it.”

Lola smiled – her lips parting slow, pursed.

136

*

Alain hadn’t heard from Jean-Luc since the audition, which had gone pretty well. He didn’t get the part. Something about a “his look,” but he got a private number from one of the casting directors.

Jean-Luc’s absence lingered in his mind. Had he left town? Gotten into some trouble?

Why hadn’t he returned his calls? Was it a woman?

Women will be the death of him, Alain thought.

He lifted a cigarette to his lips and crossed his legs, peering down over his sunglasses at the pedestrians passing by. He was sitting on the patio of a tiny bistro in Century City and reading L’etranger. Jean-Luc had recommended it to him.

The book seemed a little odd.

The narrator kept prattling on about his mother being dead and how he didn’t feel anything about it and then he shoots a guy on a beach for no reason. Alain couldn’t figure out what Jean-Luc liked about it.

Jean-Luc was like that, liking crazy things, driving that motorcycle of his through the streets at blinding speed – a red blur flying past the motionless traffic. Alain adored that about him. The aura of certainty was intoxicating – even if it was fake.

The waitress came over to his table to freshen his coffee. He smiled at her. She was young and had dirty blonde hair and freckles. He told her thank you and she smiled and nodded, jutting out her lower lip suggesting some sort of loose camaraderie.

Alain told her that she was beautiful and asked if he could get his check. She came back a minute later and winked at him as she left the bill and her phone number on the table. 137

Alain would call her weeks later and they would make love in her apartment on Wilshire

Boulevard and she would tell him about growing up in Pennsylvania and how she came to L.A. to be an actress and he would kiss her and end the conversation by eating her pussy.

The sky was wide open and Alain watched the single wisp of a cloud overhead drift by and felt a solid contentment doing so. It was picture perfect.

He was waiting to meet with the casting director he met the day before.

His name was Hirschfeld.

The man sported a brown ponytail and thick beard. He wore v-necks under mustard colored sports coats. He told Alain that he had a role for him – in a movie. Called him a

“breakthrough talent.” He told Hirschfeld that he’d meet him for lunch and they could discuss it.

Alain hoped he would not have to do anything untoward.

The traffic was moving like a fluid, spraying through the city, down the road – off to rounded destinations – in and out, lost, missing, found and forgotten. Given and forsaken.

He wondered when Hirschfeld would show up. Alain couldn’t remember his first name.

Was it Barry?

Who was anyone?

Alain thought of Michelle, the little fluffer from the last shoot, and he wondered if she knew her way home. If she could find her way in the dark – maybe that was all you needed. The thought was strange. Figments of life – a memory of someone else. He wanted to wrap her up in that trenchcoat of hers and run all the way out of the city – her in his arms. He wanted to live with her in the desert, right by the sun on the horizon.

“Habish, is that you?” Hirschfeld said, clapping his hands and adjusting his sports coat.

He took a seat at Alain’s table before Alain could muster a word. 138

“Barry,” Alain guessed his name, “how are you?”

“Good, good. Very good. Gotta jet in about fifteen, meeting a hot little number for a casting call. Cute little thing. Eighteen. Tight as a drum.” Barry winked and clacked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

“You don’t say,” Alain said. He paused. “So what about this movie?”

“Right, right. Can I get a drink?” Barry flagged down the waitress. “Rum n Coke, on the rocks – be generous.” The waitress nodded and then smiled at Alain as she turned away. “The movie is gonna be big,” Barry said.

“What’s it about?” Alain asked.

“Right. Picture this: Los Angeles, the early 2000’s. A cute little hometown girl comes to

LA to make it big. A sharp-tongued guy of an ethnic persuasion struggles as an actor. They meet

– they hit it off – they fall in love,” he paused, “with lots of struggles and trials and tribulations along the way, of course. It’s not easy for them. But they persevere. They do dirty jobs, the fight the system – all the while trying to break in! It’s fantastic. Anyway, they meet an independent film maker, and at first they think he’s hokey, full of malarkey, but he pitches them this idea.

‘Let’s make a film, a real film, where you two fuck – and it’s not a porno – it’s legit. And we film the whole scene in front of the Hollywood sign!’” Barry smacked his hands together.

“Whatd’ya think of that?!”

“The Hollywood sign?”

“Well, it’ll most likely be on a green screen, but it’d look like you were in front of the

Hollywood sign.”

“And this is for real?”

“As real as it gets.” 139

Alain bit his tongue.

“I’m not sure.”

“Listen kid, if you’re worried about the sex scene-”

“I don’t know if it’s the right move for me, Barry.” Alain looked at him, trying to lock eyes with the man. “I told you at the audition. I’m trying to leave certain things behind.”

“I haven’t told you the best part yet,” Barry said.

“What’s that?”

“We got Lola Lanahan as the female lead.”

“Who?” Alain asked.

“She’s a cute little starlet. She wants to do something risqué and you want to do something artistic. It’s a golden opportunity for both of you. What are you worried about?”

Alain did not know what he was worried about and he felt like a fool. It didn’t matter what the film was – it was a film, a starring role being dropped in his lap.

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll do it.”

140

*

Lola was at one of her dealer’s.

She bought her cocaine from a Russian immigrant named Ivan. He wore tracksuits or pinstripe pants and a wife-beater. His mustache was unkempt and he often talked of the old country and his cousins and their prison records.

When he put the bags of crystallized powder on the scale he would smoke a cigarette and eye Lola’s thighs.

“At the time when the Soviet Union dissolved,” Ivan said, “a lot of people went hungry – were forced into poverty. That is why I am here, in America, selling drugs.”

“You don’t say,” Lola said.

“It was a conspiracy,” Ivan said, “to introduce capitalism back into Russia.” He sniffed a little bit of coke off of a tiny gold spoon. “The ‘hardliners’ were a ploy to get the majority of the youth to accept the transition back to a bourgeois oligarchy.”

Lola didn’t care and she didn’t understand what he was talking about.

“So, there wasn’t any vodka and potatoes after that?” she grinned.

“Very funny,” Ivan said. “There wasn’t any cohesion – the energy of the revolution dissapated into blue jeans and rock music. I was a young man at the time. I decided that it would be better to live in the U.S. if Russia was going to abandon kommunizm. If the world is going to end, I’d rather see another country rot instead of my own. And where better to sell drugs than in the belly of the beast.”

“I’m hungry,” Lola said, eyeing the coke. “Here’s your money.”

She handed a rolled one hundred dollar bill to Ivan and he unfolded it and stuck it in his pocket. 141

Lola took the coke and left the house, stepping out into a blinding sun from which she had to shade her eyes.

There used to be a dog named Rufus out front that would bark at her when she walked up on Ivan’s porch, but the dog had died months ago after being struck by a car.

Lola missed the dog and its ugly bark – an echo caught in the past.

She whistled as she walked to her car.

Ten minutes later she was downtown writhing her way through traffic – late for a meeting with Barry. She called his phone.

“Barry,” she said when he answered. “How did it go?”

“He sounded interested,” Barry said.

“What would you say – on a scale of one to ten?”

“An eight at the very least, babes. He’s a fox.”

“He’s Iranian?”

“Algerian,” Barry said.

“I’m turning off Sunset now. I’ll be at your place in ten minutes to celebrate.” 142

*

Alain didn’t know the young man.

The music around them was deafening.

He watched him across the dance floor and wanted to touch him. The boy’s skin was smooth and taut and the colored lights stuck to it, illuminating him in swathes of pink and green and blue. He had broad shoulders and a slender waist. He was smoking a cigarette as a girl danced next to him.

Alain thought he looked a little bored. He cut through the crowd and whispered in his ear mid-drag and the boy exhaled.

“Yeah?” he mouthed.

Alain nodded.

They left the club and made love in the boy’s apartment next to the coffee maker in his kitchen. It was cold there and smelled of cigarettes and dark roast. There were small, bucolic paintings hung at crooked angles on the walls of the living room above a beige loveseat.

Alain poured himself a drink. The boy sat on the loveseat and put on his shirt.

Alain opened the freezer and removed the ice tray and put three cubes of ice in his drink.

He told the boy that he was beautiful and that he was sorry that one night couldn’t mean more than it did.

They kissed.

Alain told him that he was special and said that this would have to be goodbye.

The boy looked at him with doleful eyes that asked him to stay.

They made love on the bed in the boy’s room and the boy clenched his sheets in his fists as Alain tugged ever so gently on his hair. 143

The next day, Alain went to meet Lola Lanahan at the downtown studio. He wore sunglasses and a dark gray suit jacket, with a tasteful light blue dress shirt from Brooks Brothers underneath. His loafers were Gucci and his pants were Hugo Boss.

Lola, he had been told, was a star undiscovered – ready to make a name for herself – ready to be the proverbial sexpot.

“A bit of a bitch,” Barry had said far too candidly, “but a sweet girl all the same.”

The meeting presented to Alain an opportunity of indeterminate measure. He knew the film could flop – the idea fizzured in his mind. He wasn’t sure it would be the end of him. Ends always come with a finality about them, and he felt no premonition, no horrible inkling about his future in Black Dolphin: The Motion Picture. Life would always move beyond itself, as if infinitely large – like a figment of a scribe’s manuscript lost in the streaming ages. Gone, in the instant of its miracle birth – forever given over to the transcience of time.

Withered and flowering in the light of the future.

Alain stopped at a red light.

The studio was behind a private gate. Alain showed his I.D. to the security guard. He parked behind a stuccoed building the shape of a rounded trapezoid and went inside.

It was hot. Extras were milling about, smothered by a sense of purpose and oblique hope.

Alain found Barry near the director. He was stroking his beard and saying that he loved the lighting, raising his hands and forming a rectangle between his thumbs and index fingers and looking at the set through it.

“Barry,” Alain said.

Barry turned and smiled, plunging his hand into Alain’s and shaking it. 144

“Alain, you swarthy bastard! Glad you could make it,” he said.

“Of course.”

Alain smiled and looked at the man at Barry’s side. He was old and short, with a gray mustache. His jacket and pants were black and he had on a yellow polo shirt, stretched over his paunch. He had a black baseball cap on that said “FUCK YOU” in bright red letters.

The man smiled.

“Name’s Roger,” he said with a thick hint of an accent, Alain couldn’t tell if it was

Columbian or Russian. “Roger Rabbit.” He extended his hand.

Alain paused.

“Nice to meet you – Mr. Rabbit…” he said, his voice slipping on the words.

“Everyone calls me Rabbit,” Roger said. “Welcome to the set of Black Dolphin.”

145

*

June, 2004. Los Angeles, California.

Lola was in the green room of the studio waiting to meet Alain. She was nibbling on a finger sandwich and thinking about what his face would look like. She’d seen headshots, but those things rarely did anyone justice. Meeting him in person would finalize the deal.

An intern popped his head into the room and told her that the director was ready for her.

Lola shooed him away and threw the rest of her sandwich in the trash.

“Time to shine,” she whispered as she blew herself a kiss in a full-length mirror.

“Barry! Roger!” she called out to them across the set. “Darlings!”

A moment later she was beside them, hugging them and planting kisses on their cheeks.

“And you must be Alain,” she said.

“Yes, I am. Nice to meet you.” He extended his hand. They were big hands with thick fingers – but smooth – like the son of a brick-layer who’d not followed in his father’s footsteps.

“Take off your sunglasses,” she told him.

She looked to Barry and Roger, who watched with rapt, beaming expressions.

Alain removed his sunglasses.

“There,” she said. “Now I can look at you.” She stepped back. “You’re cute, that’s for sure. But I don’t know about your eyes. They should be green. Brown is so bleh.”

“We can get him contacts, dollface,” Barry said. “Check out that bod, though.”

Lola checked out his bod.

“It’s nice,” she said, opening up Alain’s suit jacket, feeling his ribcage with her index fingers, squeezing his pecs, stroking his stomach.

She pinched one of his nipples. 146

Alain jumped.

Lola giggled.

“Alain, are you blushing?” Roger asked.

Barry said, “Only our little Lola can make a dark man blush.”

Little Lola walked behind the nervous former porn star and squeezed his buttocks in both hands, kneading it, judging its weight and consistency.

“Nice butt,” she said. “Yeah, this’ll work. When do we start?”

“Rehearsal starts tomorrow,” Roger said. “I’m giving you two copies of the script. I want you to spend the next twenty-four hours together. Learn your lines, learn your characters, learn something about each other. From this point forward, I want you two to be inseparable. Day and night, I want you two near each other. Learn everything you can. Nothing is too mundane. Drink up every detail. I want you two to eat, sleep, and breathe one another.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Lola said.

She turned to Alain and put her hands on his shoulders. “Come to my apartment?”

147

*

Lola’s apartment was nice and Alain felt like he should look impressed. It was impressive, after all.

“You must get steady work,” he said.

There were two large white leather sofas with pink and black throw pillows. A big screen television was mounted over a recessed gas fireplace. The floor tile was black and white marble.

The apartment was a studio, but large, and with freestanding walls creating the illusion of separate rooms.

“Do you like it?” Lola said.

“It’s quite nice,” Alain said.

He touched the leather of the couch.

“What would you like to do?” Lola asked, looking coy – putting her hand on her hip and leaning into it.

“I don’t know. What do you usually do?”

Alain saw her pause.

Her face became crafty and insidious – like a hungry hawk.

“Want some coke?”

“Cocaine?”

“Yeah.”

Alain thought about it.

“Maybe just a bit,” he said. “A little bump.”

Lola clapped and squealed and ran off into another room.

Alain sat down on the couch. 148

“Where are you from?” Alain called.

“A shitty little town called Branville, Minnesota.”

“Branville?”

“Yeah. Branville.”

Alain watched her exit the other room with a little mirror and a twenty dollar bill and a razor blade. She sat down at the end of the glass coffee table and faced him.

“There’s not much to say about it,” she said. “It was home for a while, and then it wasn’t.”

“Do you miss your family?”

Lola smiled.

“Sometimes,” she said. “But all I ever wanted was to get away.”

A clock was ticking.

“What were they like?” Alain asked.

“Simple. Boring at times. But honest. They were – well, for the most part, only concerned with keeping me safe.”

“A gilded cage?”

“Not even. A plastic cage – one you can get at the dollar store. I had to get away. I did some acting in the Midwest, but my father – well, he was too involved. When I started getting acting work, he held onto my money.”

“I understand.”

“What about you?”

“You mean my parents?”

“Yeah.” 149

Alain paused.

“I was born in Algiers, but I didn’t grow up there. My parents moved to New York City when I was still very little.” Alain paused. “What’s your favorite film?” Alain asked.

Lola cut up the coke.

“What?” she asked.

“What’s your favorite film?” he said.

“What do you think my favorite film is?”

Alain paused.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you to ask that.”

“I’ll give you a hint,” Lola said. “It doesn’t suck.”

“Singing in the Rain?”

“Ha, cute. But no.”

“Casablanca?”

“Mmm, better.”

“I give up,” Alain said. “What is it?”

Lola smiled and cut up three large lines.

“The Seven Year Itch,” she said.

Alain thought to himself.

“With Marilyn Monroe?”

“Yeah.”

He laughed.

“It’s fitting,” he said.

“Why?” 150

“It just suits you,” he laughed again. “I don’t know.”

Lola did half of a line and passed the mirror to Alain.

He took it and placed it on the table, then picked up the twenty and rolled it tight and bent down to snort up the line.

“It’s pretty good,” Lola said.

Alain laughed again and tried not to exhale on the coke.

“It’s been a while for me,” he said.

He snorted up the line in two quick breaths. He saved a tiny part of it to rub on his gums, and he let the bitter taste fill his mouth.

Lola took the mirror back.

“I can pretty much never get enough of it,” she said. “I go through two or three bags a week.”

“Really?” Alain laughed. “You should be careful.”

He folded up his hands and crossed his legs.

“Careful? Honey, nothing was ever learned by being careful.”

Alain sat back, regarding her.

She took what was left of the cocaine and smiled at him.

“You’re different,” she said.

“I’m different?”

“Yeah, you’re different from most men.”

“I don’t know how different I am,” Alain said.

“You seem nice. Most people aren’t so nice.” She paused. “You were a porn star, right?”

Alain sat up. 151

“Not a star exactly.”

“You didn’t like it, did you?”

He smiled.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t care much for it. I was in that business too long.”

“And so what is this?”

“What is what?” he asked, confused.

“What is Black Dolphin?”

“It’s different,” he said. “It sounds like a mess, but there’s a heart in it.”

“I don’t even really get what it’s about,” Lola said.

“Does that matter? Does that really matter anymore?”

They were silent for a moment.

“You want some more coke?” she asked.

Alain said that he didn’t and he sat there nervously.

“I think this film will mean something once it’s finished,” he said. “I don’t think it knows what it is yet.”

152

*

Lola bent down and finished the coke and Alain watched her.

He looked very stern and unsure.

“Do you want to read some of the script together?” he asked.

“The script?”

“Yeah. Let’s give it a look.”

“Okay,” Lola said, moving across the room and grabbing the thin set of bound paper.

“The beginning?” she asked, flipping past the first few pages.

FADE IN:

Ext. LOS ANGELES – ALLEY, DAY. A CAMERAMAN follows a young red-haired GIRL. GIRL looks confused. GIRL turns and looks directly into CAMERAMAN’s CAMERA. GIRL

So, how long do you think you guys will be

following me?

CAMERAMAN

As long as it takes. This practically writes

itself.

GIRL

Well, we’ll see. I don’t know what you expect to happen.

A swarthy YOUNG MAN with BACKPACK walks into the alley.

CAMERAMAN

Who is that? 153

GIRL

I don’t know, let’s find out. They all meet and shake hands. The YOUNG MAN smiles at the

CAMERA.

CAMERAMAN

What’s your name? YOUNG MAN

James Deene

CAMERAMAN

Like “James Dean”? YOUNG MAN

It’s spelled differently, but yeah, I guess so.

JAMES DEENE and the GIRL exchange glances

CAMERAMAN

You wanna be in a movie?

JAMES DEENE

What kind of movie?

CAMERAMAN

That’s up to you. Lola looked at Alain.

Their eyes met.

“I’m not sure what to think,” Lola said.

“It different from what I’m used to.” 154

There was a stillness in the air. Lola felt a chill run through her shoulders, shaking out of her body and tussling her hair.

“Want to get something to eat?” Lola asked. She wasn’t hungry.

“Sure. Let’s go.”

The sun was that still-same peculiar ball of light, hovering and doting on the people below. Lola held the door open for Alain as they walked out her apartment building. Outside, a young man with blonde hair was sitting on a fire apple red motorcycle by the curb. He was holding his helmet in one hand and running his fingers through his hair with the other. Sunlight was streaming through the strands.

“Who is that?” Lola asked.

“Jean-Luc?”

The thatch-headed man-boy smiled at them.

“Alain,” he said. “It is good to see you.” He got off the bike and hugged him. “And who might this delightful young lady be?”

“You followed us here, did you not? You know who she is.”

Lola shrugged her shoulders and twisted her hair around her finger. She asked,

“Can I go for a ride?”

She watched Jean-Luc’s face stretch wide with a smile as he tossed her the helmet.

155

The Writer

March, 2014. Akron, Ohio.

The writer sat down at his computer and thought about Black Dolphin. His thesis defense was rapidly approaching. The looming date felt like a stone in his stomach. He imagined the mounting pressure of a deadline was the cause of the nightmare – that and being hungry.

Sometimes he did not get paid for weeks. His stipend all had to be saved for rent and bills.

He had no money.

He sat in the darkness after M had fallen asleep in his bed and he thought of those terrified moments upon awakening from that dream – he’d felt like a little boy again.

He opened the document on his laptop and started to reread parts of Black Dolphin. The moments that felt painful were the moments he needed to rewrite. But he felt oddly moved – rather, he felt moving.

Sad. Happy. Exhausted. Twisted. Love-filled. Entirely flawed.

The shape of a novel – the idea. Intangible. Grotesque. Floating, broken – heart-broken.

Silly. Raucous. The stuff of nightmares. The doleful shade. The dimming of the light. The loss of innocence. The brilliance of death. The feebleness of our selves. The strength of our spirit. The death of our hearts. The sunshine in the morning. Our bed rest at night. Our sick twisted fantasies. Our political naiveté. Our hope for the future. Our disgust with the two party system.

Our livid, self-righteous double-talk. Our trust and error and film and music and money and terror – our love and gods and beauty and poison and passion and fashion and rabbits. Wisdom.

Pain. Peace. Revolution. Birth. And then nothing.

The writer wrote a note to himself, as a reminder of what was to come: 156

“Alain is beginning to recognize the flaws, not only in himself in terms of how he relies on disparate sexual connections with others to find attachment – attachment being something he both desires and fears – but in his desire to work in Hollywood and be taken seriously as an actor as well.

Alexei is planning something far more nefarious than what readers may have suspected, and perhaps I should have foreshadowed more in his sections up to this point. He is planning to leave Kreshko once he obtains enough funds – will he kill Davi and Sergei?

Vigo is, in a humorous sense, ‘an old Bolshevik.’ He is a Marxist-Leninist, believes in a vanguard party and perpetuating what Trotsky would have called ‘the theory of permanent revolution.’ However, he is also implicitly a chauvinist. He considers the family unit to be bourgeois and his relationships with women were almost exclusively based around sex. He represents the failure of the Old Left. Kidnapping Simone was to be his last job – but what of his payment?

Simone is a ‘New-Communist,’ meaning not only new to the theories and ideas of communism (as exampled by her fascination with Trotsky’s memoir) but she represents a new kind of communism. She is honest and passionate. Cares deeply. Despises the underhanded and the snobbish. Hates liberals and their self-serving political morality. She represents, among other things, not only the question of how to enact revolution in the belly of Imperialism but also of what ideology is to take shape and what system is to replace the old. She represents my generation. She embodies the questions and contradictions faced by violent revolution – revolution emboldened by both justice and passion.

Lola is spiraling down. She will want to take Alain with her. (Will he save her?) She hates parts of herself, which makes her hate other people. She wants to break into Hollywood 157 and is close to doing so – this needs to be conveyed more in the narrative. She does not know what she wants – but if it were to be articulated, it would be the phrase, ‘I want to go home.’” 158

Part II

“My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise, a captive as Racine, the man of craft, drawn through his maze of iron composition by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre. When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body caught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines, the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . . I have sat and listened to too many words of the collaborating muse, and plotted perhaps too freely with my life, not avoiding injury to others, not avoiding injury to myself-- to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction, an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting my eyes have seen what my hand did.”

- Dolphin, by Robert Lowell