Mystery Girl: A Novel (33 page)

83

WE LANDED IN SAN DIEGO
and picked up the car. Nic drove. As soon as my phone found a signal, I tried my wife’s number. A recording told me that the subscriber was not accepting calls. And if she never did, how would I really feel? Hadn’t some part of me wished for exactly this? I was free. I glanced at my blond companion coolly changing lanes. She noticed my stare and smiled.

“Why don’t you try to nap?” she asked.

“I can’t,” I said and shut my eyes, certain I was too distraught to sleep. When I opened them I was outside the Lonsky residence and I felt almost normal.

Roz answered the door. Fine and snow-pure, her hair was like a halo, the pink of her skull shining through. She wore a powder-blue pantsuit, with nothing under the jacket but her bra.

“Oh, it’s you. Nice tooth.”

“What? Oh, is it noticeable?” I smiled and tested it with my tongue. “Thanks. It’s from Mexico.”

“Yeah, it looks Mexican.”

“It does? Huh. And you can tell which one is new?”

Nic stepped between us. “Is Solar around?”

“Yeah,” Roz said, lighting a 100. “And I hope you’ve come to talk him out of this nonsense. The fool hasn’t been anywhere except the nuthouse in a decade.”

“Kornberg! Kornberg!” I heard his bellow issue from the study and went in, trailed by Nic and Roz. The big man was dressing. He wore the pants and vest of a summer suit in white linen, a pale pink shirt, and black suspenders. He was knotting a deep blue tie, while his jacket enveloped the back of his chair. Mrs. Moon flustered about, adding items to a huge old leather suitcase that looked like something Charlie Chaplin might stow away inside.

“Ah, there you are,” he said. “I’m almost ready to depart. Your
friend Milo called and he obtained the projector. He’s meeting us at the hotel.” He slipped on his jacket and began to fold a silk hanky that matched the blue of his tie. “Nice tooth.”

Nic shook her head. “Solar…” she began.

“You can tell too?” I said. “Funny, it doesn’t hurt at all. I can’t even remember which it is.”

“Just remember it’s the gold one,” Lonksy suggested.

“Gold?” I asked. “What? Where’s a mirror?”

“Next door.” Solar waved a distracted hand.

“Wait…” Nic said. I rushed next door to the bathroom mirror. My upper left canine gleamed. Gold. Nic put her hand on my shoulder.

“I was going to tell you. I just wanted you to relax a bit first.”

“I look ridiculous,” I said, staring into my mouth.

“Not really. It looks kind of cool. Anyway, you can have it changed.” She kissed my cheek. “It’s sexy. I promise. Now let me change those dressings while we’re here.”

She opened her bag and began pulling out supplies. She looked in the medicine cabinet and found a small scissors, then shut it, causing my face to reappear. I practiced different expressions, trying to talk and smile without showing my tooth. Nic snipped away the tape and unwound the wrapping from my pinkies as if opening a prize. They were fat and turgid, like swollen tongues or blind purple grubs, stitched together with black thread.

“They look good,” Nic said, not very convincingly. “I mean considering.”

Lonsky loomed in the door. “We should leave,” he said, finalizing his tie in the mirror. “I’m packed and ready, and I want to arrive before dinner. And by the way, you’re pinkies are transposed.”

“They’re what?” I asked, holding them out like odd accessories I was considering returning to a store.

“Is that the word I want?” he said. “Reversed? They attached the severed appendages to the wrong stumps.”

“No.” I stared hard at them. “That’s impossible. How do you know?”

“Because your right pinky, the old right, had a spot of psoriasis on the outside. And your left was a bit bent, perhaps from a childhood accident.”

“What?” I remembered the psoriasis, and the jammed finger when I fell off my bike at twelve, my last bad injury till now. “Holy fuck, you’re right. Jesus, what did those monsters do to me while I was unconscious?”

Nic patted my arm. “It looks fine, no one can tell.”

“Fine? They maimed me. Weren’t you watching?”

“I was in shock. That man was pinching my nipples. They’re really sore.”

“Yeah well, at least they’re still attached. And to the right tits.”

“Get a hold of yourself,” Lonsky said. “They are merely pinkies after all. The least of the digits. Thumbs would be another matter. Or ears. Anyway, perhaps they can be corrected at a later date, but we really must go now if we’re going to make dinner. I reserved a table.”

“Solar,” I said. “Fuck dinner.” I slipped away from Nic and stood in the doorway, gauze trailing from my hands. “I want to know right now before we go anywhere. What do you know about my wife?”

“No more than you,” he said, straightening his collar. “I don’t even know the woman.”

“I’m serious. I want to know what’s going on. This can’t be a coincidence.”

He turned to regard me from his great eminence. He was as wide as the door. I felt I was staring up at a monument.

“No it cannot,” he told me. “I have always said so. And now, if you indeed want to know the truth, which people rarely do, then I suggest we suspend debate, wrap your mismatched appendages, and proceed.”

And with that Solar Lonsky proceeded, with a quiet dignity, out of his front door.

84

JOSHUA TREE IS MORE
than just a great place to trip on mushrooms. It is a place created by the gods while they were tripping on mushrooms. It is the Land of the Lost. It is Bedrock, a Flintstones landscape of cartoon colors and morphing, melting shapes. Boulders the size of two-family homes are strewn like forgotten marbles across the horizon. There are drip castles and rock skulls, ice cream sundaes and sleeping dinosaurs all of stone and sand. There is a mountain made entirely of bowling balls. Then there are the namesake cacti, an army of scarecrows, pierced Gumbys beseeching the empty sky, crucified trees with pincushion hands and thorny heads that flame into white blossoms when the rain comes in the spring.

We took the Twentynine Palms Highway into the tiny sun-dazed town, low buildings and blank streets sparsely populated with an odd mix of spiritual hippies, desert rats, and Marines from the nearby base. We found the UPS franchise and Nic and I went in, leaving Lonsky stowed in the backseat, which he’d chosen for safety reasons. I’d been mulling the name question over during the drive, wondering what alias Zed would choose, and gave the clerk, a stout lady, redheaded and soap-pale in her glass room of frozen air, my best shot. Minutes later, she handed me a small express envelope addressed to B. Traven. It contained another plain white envelope, which in turn held a small key and a numerical code on a slip of paper: 12-15-22-5 6-18-15-13 8-1-4-5-19.

In the car, Lonsky glanced at the paper and chuckled. “Quite witty, really. He would have been a man worth meeting.”

“You mean Zed?” I asked, craning my head. “Why?”

Lonsky scowled at me. “Surely you can solve a simple alphanumerical substitution code, Kornberg. They’re for children.” Nic grinned at this while she drove.

“Let’s just say I don’t feel like it.”

“If one replaces the numbers with the corresponding letters, the
message reads ‘love from Hades.’ No doubt Zed felt it was his own, and the real B. Traven’s, most suitable return address.”

At the bank, Nic said she was Mona Naught’s daughter, and gave the code, which no one there chuckled at, and after a long delay, the young blond clerk returned.

“Oh my God,” she warbled in her frank California accent. “No one’s opened this box in ten years,” as if ten were a thousand and we were unearthing a time capsule. She asked us if we wanted a private room, but she was clearly hoping not and it didn’t seem likely that the box contained diamonds or a bomb. So she turned her key and I turned mine. She held her breath and widened her eyes. Nic grabbed my wrist under the counter. The lid stuck for a second and then I opened it with a pop. It contained two unlabeled film canisters. “Sixteen millimeter, I think,” I said.

The clerk looked bummed. “Maybe you should open them and check,” she suggested. We declined and returned to the car. While our backs were turned, evening had begun to creep in. The horizon darkened, and as evening approached, Lonsky’s belly was growling.

“Well done,” he said when I handed him the canisters. “We will watch these right after dinner.”

“Do you really think we should wait?” I asked.

“I can’t think on an empty stomach,” Lonsky said petulantly.

“How about some nuts?” Nic asked. “Or chips and salsa?”

He didn’t even stoop to a reply. Finally we compromised and pulled into a diner he somehow knew and picked up a couple of barbequed pork sandwiches and coleslaw sides to tide him over and keep his brain going. Then we went to the inn where he’d booked our rooms. Built on a palmy oasis, it was a pleasantly run-down cluster of bungalows surrounding a pool where a boy in goggles and a girl in a swim cap and nose plugs were seeing who could hold their breath the longest, and a restaurant, of which Lonsky approved as “homey and fulfilling.” Like a bear leaving his winter cave, he
emerged, blinking and grumbling, from the backseat and put on a panama hat.

Milo had already arrived with the projector and had set up in Lonksy’s bungalow, which contained a rustic lounge. He’d hung a bedsheet on the wall and was extremely bored after hours of waiting with no TV or Internet.

“Jesus fucking Christ you kept me waiting long enough,” he said as we entered. “Some emergency.” Then noticing my hands, he brightened. “Holy shit, what happened to you? Hey!” He pointed cheerfully at my mouth, which I’d almost managed to forget for a minute. “You look like Eli Wallach in
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
He’s the ugly,” he explained to Lonksy, in case he didn’t know the film. Lonsky lowered himself onto a wicker love seat, which sighed tragically beneath him.

“Sandwiches,” he commanded.

I handed him the paper bag and gave Milo the canisters. “Are you going to show this or not?”

Milo carefully pried open a canister. “The film gets brittle sitting so long and I don’t want it to break.” He slipped on white cotton gloves and took out a small film splicer and some black leader. While he worked, Lonksy munched thoughtfully. Nic offered to find cold drinks and ice.

“Do you need aspirin, for your hands?” she asked, stroking my arm.

“No thanks,” I said, and she smiled, then sashayed out.

Milo turned to me, his voice low. “Are you doing her?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sort of. I guess.”

“Nice work,” he said, and I couldn’t help feeling a surge of foolish pride. “I’m glad too,” he went on, “because it makes it easier to break the news about me and MJ.”

“What news?”

“We’re going to have a baby.”

“When? I’ve only been gone two days.”

“Her and Margie want kids and they asked me to be the donor. We were worried you might be, you know, crushed emotionally, since you always had a thing for her and your wife just dumped you.”

“But I don’t have a thing.”

“Whatever. It just seemed emotionally cleaner with me. Plus I’m extremely virile. My sperm count is unusually high. And my motility’s off the charts.”

“OK. Well, congratulations. That’s… intense.”

“They’re talking turkey baster, but I’m pushing for direct insemination. You know. Penile. I think it’s better for the kid.”

“I thought you were gay?”

“What’re you talking about? I’m so bi it’s ridiculous. I watch straight porn all the time. I was watching
Sausage Fest Two
last night. Twenty naked dudes and this fat chick.”

“If you say so.”

He gave me an evil look and began to rewind the reel. “The point, hombre, is that MJ wants my sperm, not yours. OK? I’m going to breed with her and then while they raise the kid I will live temporarily in the guesthouse. Sorry if that’s tough for you to accept. The guesthouse has its own little sauna.”

“Congratulations, stud.” I slapped his back. “I’m a proud uncle.”

“Thanks.” He grinned and slid a reel onto the arm of the projector. “I’m just glad you found a replacement for Lala. She kind of looks like her too.”

“No she doesn’t. She’s blond and taller.”

“Whatever. She’s your type. The tragic femme fatale type.”

“But she turned out not to be that at all,” I said. “That was an act. She’s more the hard-nosed chick with the soft heart. And besides, Lala’s Mexican.” I sighed. “At least that’s one fact we established about her.”

“I know. The big guy told me. Well, hang in there.” He flipped a switch and the machine began to hum, throwing a white square onto the sheet. “Let’s see what happens in the next reel. Go get your girl and your soda. It’s showtime.”

85

UNLIKE THE OTHER FILMS
in the trilogy,
Ascension
was just uncut footage, shown as it was shot in the camera, so one could only guess at the themes and intended sequence. The movie was set in the desert, close to where we sat, among the crags and ridges of the park. The film stock gave it a brightly dated look, but the homemade, school-play-style costumes, and the timeless, epic, Biblical-Western scenery made it seem as if it could have been shot any time.

Two women in goddess gear (gauzy whatevers and body glitter, Venetian masks and peacock feathers) scamper over desert landmarks while a group of men in black suits, ties, and black masks pursues them. There were a lot of beauty shots: erect nipples silhouetted against the tangerine sun, firm buttocks rising between red rocks, a landscape of hips and hollows, soft focus sand-slopes and close-up beads of sweat. The damsels appear and disappear, with simple camera trickery, teasing and cajoling the men, who seem to be invoking them as muses or spirits, able to bestow the various gifts they demand: knowledge, power, money, glory, talent. A guy I knew was Zed, from his voice, stumbled around, sand in his hair, and shouted at the heavens, “Genius! Grant me genius, you goddess, you bitch, and I will give you all, my soul, my heart, my balls!” This drew snickers from Milo and Nic. Lonsky watched impassively, though I could hear his slow breathing back there, like an idling machine, like an enormous cat.