Claire's Head (30 page)

Now the light in his office dissolved Jamie Reza into a dazzling blackness, from which he returned, swivelling in his chair, gesticulating, the chair squeaking beneath him. She wished he would pull shut the drapes, yet closing the curtains would mean shutting out the fifth-floor view, which was helping to anchor her: to the northwest, a slice of the Strip, a space needle, to the north, the mountains.

“Even if we did, if we do have ways of controlling pain, certain kinds of pain at least, say pain like yours, headache pain, migraine pain, just say, just say, why would anyone release it? Or market it? Presuming we're talking about a drug. Even if it wasn't. But let's say a drug. What value does it have if there's no way to make money off it? Okay? Even if people say they want it, even if they say they're looking for it, really? I'm saying even if such a thing is possible, you'd never hear about it. Headaches. Huge economic cost in lost days. Huge military problem, by the by. Great if they could be eliminated. I'm saying, even if in the best of all possible worlds, there's a cure, you're not going to see
it. What you'll see – how fast you can get something into the system. Optimal length of time of pain relief. What is it? Four hours, twelve hours? New generations of nonopiate drugs.”

Jamie Reza was cannier, Claire thought, than he let on. A lot of his display was a bluffer's, a showman's energy. She wondered if any of his research was military, given the part of the world they were in. What if he himself had developed a pill, a panacea, that eradicated pain like hers? What if Rachel (based on a hunch or some research she'd found) had suspected as much? What if she'd come in pursuit of him? How much would she herself give for a cure like that?

She showed him the photograph of Rachel, which had begun to feel so out-of-date, a relic, nearly antique. She asked if there was a way to get a list not only of conference attendees but the media. Who knew what address and contact information Rachel had given. She would pass on what information she could to Detective Bird, and if she had trouble ask him to request more.

There'd been quite a few attractive dark-haired women of approximately five-foot-six at the 14th International Headache Symposium, Dr. Reza said. Of various nationalities. He couldn't say he hadn't met Rachel, couldn't say he had.

Claire pressed her fingers to the point above her right eyebrow that ached, touched the three points across the top of her head. Even when she buried her hands in her lap, she found her cold fingertips, despite herself, moving back to the burning point on her forehead.

Dr. Reza leaned across his desk. “Believe me, I will never deny that a bad headache is a terrible thing.”

The evening before, Claire had taken her third Zomig, along with an Anaprox. At dawn, after waking without relief, she'd gambled and taken the last Zomig because sometimes taking one at such an hour proved lucky. She'd had no caffeine since arriving in Las Vegas. No milk, no alcohol. Her pain would diminish a little but kept coming back.

She took the business card that Dr. Reza handed to her and rose to her feet. She could ask him for a prescription for Zomig, for Elavil, since she was now out of Zomig and the only Elavil she had were the pills from Rachel's expired bottle, which were two years out of date. Yet she was supposed to be home by the end of the next day, and she was feeling a little hopeless, currently, about any pill's ability to help her.

What if the medications she depended on stopped working? Would fear that the drugs were failing her make the pain worse? Was she, like Rachel, growing sensitive to smaller and smaller stimuli, the pain grooves in her nerves growing deeper and easier to fall into, every new pain a culmination of every previous one, or was she, along with everyone else, approaching some collective threshold?

She and Brad had arranged to meet at five, at a place called The Hookah Lounge. Claire had misunderstood. Not hooker,
hookah
, he'd mimed. Not on the Strip but in a strip mall. On the southwest corner of Flamingo and Maryland Parkway.

All roads seemed to be lined with nearly identical strip malls. The only grace was the expanse of sky above the flattened landscape. On Maryland, a school bus refitted for a summer camp
was stopped, its hazard lights flashing, in the middle of six lanes of traffic behind a dented car. There were no ambulances, only silent police cruisers and, at the curb, a pack of giant idling sport-utility vehicles. Apparently the bus doors could not be opened. Parents huddled at the roadside, desperate to reach their children. Small trapped hands and faces were visible inside.

A doorknob, shiny and bright. Beyond the door, a fountain in a kind of covered courtyard. There were wrought-iron tables and trees in pots. A young woman pointed Claire towards another door, on her left. She counted four steps and entered a darkened room, a room full of hookahs. The hookahs were set on low stands, and different coloured floodlights had been built into the stands, illuminating the hookahs from below so that their glass bowls glowed pink blue yellow lime. They seemed to swell and gyrate as Claire approached. Their long pipes arced at their sides like the elegant necks of birds. Only one hookah was in use. Brad was seated behind it on a cushioned banquette that ran along the far wall. Velvet and embroidered pillows surrounded him. He lolled like a pasha, the only person in the room, lips to the hookah's long, caterpillarish neck as he inhaled. His hair, lit by the floodlamp, was green. He waved. She floated towards him. The air held none of the acridity of cigarette smoke, but was tinged with a curious sweetness. There were no windows here either. The plum-dark walls were hung with curtains, interspersed with shadowy paintings. The womblike room enveloped them. It was hard to believe they were still in Las Vegas. The illusion of the Strip gave way to a sense of being transported elsewhere. Happy hookah hour, Brad said. Or was it hookah happy hour? The pulsing music was loud, which made it difficult
to hear him, especially since her brain felt partly disconnected from her body. Raising his eyebrows in query, Brad offered Claire a small plastic tip, her own, to fit over the end of the pipe's mouthpiece, then leaned close to whisper in her ear. “It's very mild. Maybe it'll even help you.” She nodded. What, in her current state, did she have to lose by trying? When she inhaled, the water in the glass bowl bubbled. Her tongue was touched by the taste of orange. Her throat didn't burn. She didn't cough. The smoke was unexpectedly calming.

She managed to form the words, Did you find anything?

“Maybe,” she thought Brad said. “I'm meeting this woman later who works at the spa at the MGM Grand. What did the doctor say?”

“He could have met her but doesn't know for sure.”

There was an empty glass in front of him, a martini or a Cosmopolitan. “I still believe we'll find something.”

“We haven't tried the desert.” Whatever Allison decided, whatever Stefan said, Claire wouldn't give up.

Brad was frowning at the hookah. “Maybe I have this effect on women.”

“What?” He made them disappear? He gave them migraines? He made their migraines worse?

“Why don't you let me give you a massage?”

“No.” Claire shook her head. “But thanks.”

He brought her back to her hotel room. Gingerly, she laid herself on the bed while Brad stood looking down at her. She smelled
alcohol on his breath, the raw trace of sunscreen on his skin. “I can't bear to see you like this.”

“I'll be fine, really.”

“Massage may help you. I won't hurt you. At any point you can tell me to stop.” People waited months to be seen by him. She was probably insane to turn him down.

“Maybe it's the place,” she said. “Maybe it's something about Las Vegas that's making me sick.”

“Maybe,” he said, “but not necessarily.”

From outside, lights bright as klieg lamps blasted in at them. Brad closed the curtains. He turned the thermostat up high, killing the air conditioning, and let the room grow warm. He asked if she minded lying on the floor, on the cushions from the sofa, which, while far from a perfect arrangement, would make it easier for him to reach both sides of her body than if she were on the bed. At what point had she agreed to this? But she no longer had the energy to argue with him. Only take off as much clothing as you feel comfortable removing. She thought of Ariel in Amsterdam. She should be at home but she no longer knew where home was. She could not call Stefan in this state because he would only get angry and blame her, convinced that what she was doing was making her own headaches worse. She frightened him. What she was doing frightened him. She was pulling apart the order of their lives. Brad retreated to the bathroom. Claire stripped to her underwear, wrapped herself in a sheet, and lay on the cushions.

He had no massage oil on him so they had to improvise with hand lotion. He rubbed his hands together to warm them but
they were still cool when he first touched her back, moving over the terrain as if reading it. Then he began to press into the muscles of her lower back, muscles she hadn't even realized were tight. The sensations that he created were painful, almost unbearable at times, and perhaps masochistically she wanted this series of countervailing pains (on her scalp, behind her shoulders, at the back of her ribs) to match and distract from what she was already feeling. No, he was articulating something in her body, using her body. What was her body saying? The articulation became a kind of release. She trusted him. Kneeling, he pressed his arm from wrist to elbow down her back, throwing his weight behind it. He stood up, resting his own back, because his positions, leaning over her, were awkward. They barely talked. She did not think about Rachel, what Rachel was to him or to her. He, too, absented himself, was present only through his actions. She did not, now, want him to stop.

Long after Brad had left her on her own once more, the phone rang in the dark. Roused from sleep, Claire scrambled to pick up the receiver. It was 1:17 a.m. She was simultaneously aware of a slight bruised sensation beneath her skin, although her memory of the massage had receded to the blurring of hallucination. The pain behind her right eye continued to throb. “Claire.” It was not Stefan but Brad, hoarsely, calling from Altha's. “She went to Mexico.”

A
fter leaving Claire, Brad told her, he'd gone to have a drink with Cleo, who was a four-foot-tall masseuse. Some people refused to believe that Cleo was strong enough to do the work but she was incredibly strong, she just had to stand on a box to reach her clients on the table. Those in the know knew to ask for her. Brad had been worked on by Cleo in the past. He thought it was likely he'd told Rachel about her.

In April, Cleo had seen a woman whom she recognized as Rachel from the photograph that Brad showed her, although in April, the woman's hair had been shorter and Cleo didn't remember the name. Journalist from New York, lived in the East Village, wrote about medical stuff and was in town for a conference – all this sounded about right, although Cleo thought the woman she'd seen was European, for some reason. The muscles of her shoulders and neck and mid-back were all striated and ropy, Cleo said, the fascia tight, too. Obviously some work had been done on her but she still wasn't releasing well. Did she say
anything about headaches, Claire asked. Apparently, she got bad ones but didn't talk about them much. According to Cleo, she didn't talk that much at all. She was quite thin and complained about not sleeping well. She didn't seem obviously depressed but was perhaps a little subdued. What Cleo remembered most clearly was that the woman said she was on her way to Mexico, to Puerto Escondido in Oaxaca, which was somewhere Cleo had always wanted to go. The woman said she was driving down, driving with someone, whether a man or another woman, Cleo didn't know. She said she was on her way to a retreat, not somewhere religious but somewhere you could kind of shut yourself away from the world. It was outside the town in the hills. The woman said she was thinking of staying there for a while.

After drinks, Brad and Cleo had gone to the spa, where Cleo unlocked the doors. Inside, they searched through the appointment book until, on April 15, they came across the name Sylvia di Castro, and Cleo said, that's her. The only address given was a room number in the Flamingo Hotel. (What number, Claire asked, but Brad couldn't remember.) Cleo found the client form that Sylvia di Castro had filled in before receiving her services. The writing was definitely Rachel's.

“Claire, I think we should drive down to Puerto Escondido.”

“Drive.” Holding on to the phone, she sat up in bed to consider this more thoroughly.

“I've been talking to Altha. She says you can't take a rental car or a borrowed car across the border but she'll sell me this car that Susie isn't using any more. Sell it cheap. We can do the ownership exchange in the morning, and then the drive should take a couple of days.”

“You don't think longer?”