A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (59 page)

Accompanying Adam Rich
’
s final interview is a full-page photo of Adam, mid-laugh. The caption reads:
“
Didn
’
t Fear the Reaper.
”
The spread is great. It looks perfect, everything down to the last detail—photos of him growing up, the one with Brooke Shields towering above him, even a bizarre shot of him, at age nine or so, with Moodie
’
s new girlfriend Michelle (she and Adam went to the same school for the arts). It
’
s all pitch-perfect, everything dead-on, believable. This will be big, we think.
“
This will be big,
”
we say.

“
Yes, this will be big,
”
we say.

Things finally seem aligned for us, with our rental situation seemingly stable, advertising somewhat better, the staff at a maximum, with six or ten or twenty interns, and now our new East Coast helper person, a twenty-two-year-old actress/waitress named Skye Bassett whom Lance has somehow roped into running around New York for us, doing meetings, planning an upcoming party, running errands.

“
An actress?
”
we say.

“
Yeah, did you see
Dangerous Minds?
She was one of the kids in the class. It was a big role. She
’
s on the box and everything.
”

“
So... what does she want with us?
”

It is a standard response. We are suspicious of anyone who offers to help us, worried about anyone who actually does. Those, like Zev, who move across the country to do so, for free, well...

I rent the movie soon after and sure enough, amid the black and Latino kids—at-risk youth, see—there is a pretty white girl with dirty-blond hair. She is tough and wears too much makeup. She has speaking lines and everything, and now she
’
s running around New York for us. She waitresses thirty hours a week at the Fashion Cafe, acts or auditions twenty hours more, squeezes our garbage in somewhere between. When she phones she is manic and funny, with a husky voice. She is one of us, and with her, and with this Adam Rich thing, it really seems like we might be turning a corner here, maybe we should really make some kind of push, actually put together a kind of business plan and get a bunch of millions of dollars and finally dominate and have bridges and grade schools named after us, arrange for the trip in the space shuttle, and maybe Shalini will get some money, too, maybe she
’
ll get back in there and do her thing because Shalini has been in the coma for about two weeks when Marny and I go one day, a bright weekday at about
noon,
and are led inside, where Shalini is there with her eyes open.

Jesus fucking Christ.

We freeze. We had not been told that her eyes were open. We want to run and tell her family.

Her eyes are open, but not open in a vacant sort of way, but open-open, absolutely. She
’
s looking at us! I move a little to the side to see if her eyes will follow me, and they do, slowly, slowly, but.. .she must be...

“
Hey Shal!
”
Marny says.

Awake!

We wash our hands and come over to one side of her bed— maybe we forget to wash our hands—and lean over in the usual way, holding her arm, all the while her eyes are following us, at least one eye is following us. The other eye is not moving, but she
’
s really watching us, with those huge eyes or eye, looking completely amazed by our presence—the stunned, mute look of a newborn. God her eyes are huge, the whites of her eyes so gigantic, bigger than before it really seems, maybe twice as big as before.

The world is in bloom. She is back, we have not lost her, she
’
s obviously back, and hearing us, and will soon talk, and then, maybe in a few days, be up and about and then back to work, chatting, creating, assembling, and finally resuming the backrubs.

One of her friends comes in. We give him an urgent sort of look, casual but urgent, not to alarm anyone, but
Jesus Christ\

We tell her to wiggle her toes and she waves her foot back and forth.

It
’
s spectacular.

It
’
s Jesus and Lazarus and Christmas.

Afterward, though, in the waiting room, we are told by one of the doctors that even with her eyes open and her seeming to be
cognizant,
she
is
still, technically, comatose. That it is not unusual, for someone still comatose to open one
’
s eyes, to respond to basic commands. We can
’
t for the life of us figure out what that means.

To us it
’
s obvious that she is awake, is back, and that it might have been us, Marny and I, that made it happen.

We leave, dizzy, catapulting. The cars in the parking lot shimmer, the sky is full of doves and big dancing puppies, all singing early Beach Boys songs. I put my arm around Marny as we walk to the car, and by the time we
get
to the car I have a fantastic idea. My idea is this: Marny and I should have sex. In the car.

My head is on some new planet, a just-found planet that
’
s full of flora and fauna and winged deer and snakes that harmonize and I am so giddy that when we get in the car I just sit there and grin. At Marny. We both are alive, and have known each other for all these years, and have made it this long, so long, we are so old and tired and have not been killed and have not fallen from a bridge or balcony or rickety deck. I am really thinking that the very best way to commemorate it all is for Marny and I to be naked with each other, and sweating—at her apartment, mine, in the car,
it
doesn
’
t matter. The beach, the park.

I need to take my clothes off. I can
’
t drive. We sit in the car, in the hospital parking lot. I can
’
t do anything else. I can
’
t go back to work. Sex is the right thing.

“
She was staring at us,
”
I say, thinking of sex.

“
It
’
s incredible,
”
Marny says, not thinking of sex.

“
She looked amazing, exactly like her—I mean, her eyes were following us!
”
I say, thinking of Shalini
’
s eyes, then of sex, and about whose apartment, mine or Marny
’
s, is closer.

“
Yeah, it was definitely her, so alert,
”
Marny says.

I pause and look at Marny and hope that my thoughts, those relating to sex, seep into her brain, or are already there. She looks ahead, through the windshield, hoping that any moment I will start the car. When she turns back to me I am still looking at her, with the grin—I don
’
t know how to broach the topic—now a shy grin. Maybe a shy grin will work.

“
I know this sounds really strange,
”
I blurt,
“
but I
’
m really horny right now.
”

There is a short pause as she diagnoses the depth of my confusion. That I am not kidding. I am thrown, because for a minute there I thought she might be on my planet, which also has water-slides, but as it turns out she is not, after all, on my planet.

“
I think we should get back to the office,
”
she says. She is right. She is good. She never gets upset when I do this. It was a dumb idea, a revolting idea. All wrong. Bad!

I ask her for a hug. She complies. While hugging, I get another very, very good idea: that Marny and I should have sex. I drag the hug out for a minute, across the bucket seats, thinking again that maybe she
’
s warming to the idea, that maybe she
’
ll change her mind and we
’
ll complete this circle...

She pulls away, pats me on the shoulder with three mini-pats, like those used to pet reptiles. Okay. I turn the car on and back up and drive out of the parking lot, and we head back to the office, the city looming up ahead, all jagged and white, all the buildings standing there, smiling, chuckling, a bunch of huge happy people. They understand.

Adam Rich insists on being picked up at the airport. I have paid for him to fly up, so he can come to a party for the release of the issue and do a few radio interviews. I had gently suggested that the shuttles to and from SFO were just great, and cheap, too, I take them all the time—but there had been a long pause, and he had then, as he had before, let me know that I was not dealing with just some high school friend coming into town. I was dealing with a major Hollywood presence, someone whose stamp had long ago been put on that
zip
code—
a made man.
He was Adam Rich! No airport shuttles for Adam Rich! No half-assed motel rooms for Adam Rich! Get serious!

Perchance was Adam starting to believe the auteur bit, the genius-working-on-
“
Squatter Project
”
deal?

I pick him up in my Civic. I am late. I am running through the carpeted hallways. I run up the escalator, to the gate, then down, to the baggage claim. I will have to page Adam Rich. He will not like this.

“
Is that you?
”

I turn around.

“
Adam.
”

“
You
’
re late.
”

And there he is. Adam Rich.

I guess I knew he was kind of short. I knew this. I will not act surprised. He is impeccably tanned, buff almost, with gelled hair, a goatee. He is wearing precisely the outfit he wore in the photo shoot—tanktop, surfer shorts, sunglasses. He looks pretty great.

We walk to the car.

When we hit San Francisco, the first thing he wants is a cigar. He must have some good cigars. He has been enjoying cigars, he insists, long before their enjoyment became so faddish, and wants me to stop at a place he knows of on Market Street so he can pick up some of this brand and that, the kind you can
’
t just get at the 7-Eleven.

I have made a reservation at a hotel near Van Ness. I have never seen the hotel before, had found it in the phone book.

“
You
’
ll like it,
”
I say.
“
It
’
s close to...stuff.
”

It
’
s not close to anything. But it was cheaper than any other place I called, and their ad was clear, and had by far the nicest illustration.

We pull into the parking lot. It
’
s a sort of Red Roof Inn, just off busy Van Ness, close to a car dealership, about three blocks from the Tenderloin. There is no air-conditioning, no pool.

He is not happy. He is exasperated. He wants to be near the water, as he clearly indicated when we spoke on the phone. We
drive to the Wharf. Once there I stop at a pay phone and look through the yellow pages. He is waiting in the car, sunglasses on. Ten minutes later I have a place, a Best Western, with A/C, a pool, five blocks from the sea lions. I drop him off and pay for the room. Over the next two days, I will do anything he wants, for we feel we owe him, because the issue, the cover of which reads:

Fare Thee Well, Gentle Friend Adam Rich, 1968-1996 His Last Days The Final Interview The Legacy He Leaves

has hit and hit big—relatively speaking, of course. When the issue was making its way to newsstands we sent out, from our Brother 600 fax machine, a press release to exactly one media outlet, the
National Enquirer,
fully intending to lie to them about the article
’
s veracity. In the interest of diverting questions from us, thus keeping the hoax alive for as long as possible, we planned to pin the story, and its fact-gathering, on its elusive British author, Christopher Pelham-Fence. All inquiries would be directed to him, though, oddly enough, he would be unavailable for a week, as he was on assignment in, we think, Romania.

Eight minutes later there was a breathless call from a producer from
Hard Copy.
We had not faxed
Hard Copy.

“
Why haven
’
t we heard about this?
”
he wanted to know.

“
Man, that
’
s a good question,
”
we said.