Noise (11 page)

I imagine her standing in a bathrobe and alpaca slippers, her hair still wet from the shower, her fingers sticky from the home-made pastry she's been rolling on her kitchen counter. I imagine peering at her through the front door's frosted glass, her face distending as she moves behind it; or how it looks from her side, the figures dark and imprecise against the night, the stick-shapes by their waists she doesn't know are guns. Or later, after they've knocked her down and carted her off to their hideout, the way she squints through a black eye at the TV screen, watching the news, seeing the building where she lived all cordoned off by police tape, reporters crowded round her mother, who wears black, and thinking:
No, that's wrong, it's she who's dead, not me. My father standing beside her is dead as well. And the detectives, anchormen and commentators, the others too, everyone behind the screen: all distant, unreal, dead.

I picture her sitting in the closet with its musty carpet and rubber-foam mattress, its soundproofing pads that smell of old sweat, listening to the radio they've placed there with her, listening hour after hour, like Orphée, as the song lyrics, bulletins and station idents run together, all the voices blurring: disc jockeys, announcers, lonely night-time callers. I hear her solitude in theirs, and theirs in hers, and in both of these the solitude of fur-trappers and gold-prospectors, bums and travelling salesmen, taxi drivers and nightwatchmen, a continental loneliness booming
and echoing through centuries. And behind all these, I hear the solitude of her own grandfather: the only child, estranged husband, jealous sugar-daddy, would-be president who couldn't get the people to like him enough to elect him so had his own world built for him to rule over and peopled it with elephants and zebras, lions, tigers, tahr goats, monkeys; filled its dining halls and billiard rooms with gargoyles, frescoes, tapestries and kantharoses; obliged his guests to watch each evening the films, still unreleased, that he'd produced; forced them to wear fancy dress so they would all stay behind masks; forbade them to speak of death, which made the word hang in the air unspoken all the time; stayed up long after they and all the butlers, gardeners, gamekeepers and switchboard operators had gone to sleep and, reclining on his four-poster beneath a painting of Napoleon alone before the Sphinx, would drift off to the sound of panthers shrieking in the night.

I imagine her hairs bristling as she tells her parents that they're bourgeois pigs and that she'll never come back home; her voice crackling with excitement as she reads on to a tape the revolutionary statement that will soon be played on every radio and television station in the country. I see her eyes blaze like coal fires as she poses with a machine gun in front of the Egyptian symbol painted on the wall: the seven-headed cobra Wadjet, Lady of Devouring Flame, Wadjet the Invincible, whose presence causes malachite to glisten, she who lives according to her will, the pupil in the eye of Re the sun, who hisses:
Few approach me. The confederacy of Seth is at my side and what is near me burns.

I picture her as the heroine of the pulp-porn novel published several years before her kidnapping in which a black man steals
a debutante named Patricia, locks her in a hideaway and has his way with her until the Negro semen pickling her brain makes her a criminal. I wonder whether her kidnappers had read it, then realise that it doesn't matter: it's all fiction, the whole thing. I tell myself she understands this, and that she's letting the story play itself out by assuming the main role.

I picture her as Tania, Che's lover; as Ophelia the teenage suicide; as Antigone the goth; as Sylvia Plath, panther-stalked girl who never had a gun placed in her hands but stuck her head inside an oven; as Molly Bloom, who lies in bed bleeding, thinking of all the men she's had; as Stephen Dedalus, boy-Cordelia who hears the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame; as James Joyce himself, who summoned it all up from a dream of a black panther; or as his favourite child Lucia, the mad spark who cracked under the weight of her inheritance. I picture her as the Statue of Liberty holding a stick of dynamite instead of a torch. I picture her as Lara Croft, raider of tombs, running through urban landscapes out of Eldridge Cleaver: armoured vehicles crisscrossing city streets, black smoke billowing against the daylight sky, the sound of tommy guns and snipers' rifles, barbed wire closing off whole sections of the city, ‘and everywhere the smell of cordite'.

I see her riding in a car through San Francisco with the window wound down, breeze tickling her hair and flapping her donkey jacket's collar, the untinned air and clear blue daylight making her giddy; then running from the car into a bank, shouting her name out as she waves her gun at terrified customers and staff. I picture the movements of the other revolutionaries as they vault the counters, throw open the cash drawers; the cascade of glass as
the bullet-peppered windows crystallise and fall; the screech of the car's tyres as it pulls off again; and her, staring back through the rear window as the bank and street and people drain away and the world retreats again behind a screen.

Like Orphée through the silver mirror: Patty in the Zone. I see her multiplying into a thousand different women as the hotlines set up in her name jam up with calls reporting sightings of her in supermarkets, cinemas and cafés, pool halls, libraries and trains. She's morphing from a typist in Louisiana to a hitchhiker in Tennessee, a croupier in Vegas, Sacramento dancer, toll-collector on the Arizona interstate, a hundred New York students, seven hundred California teenagers–and splitting further in kaleidoscopes of fantasies and dreams, her image broken down to arsenals of double-gauges, thirty-calibres and twelve-bores, grenades and pipe bombs, angles of limbs on shadows of assassins climbing staircases at night. And she becomes some of these images, some of the characters as well: dressing as an airline stewardess, a hotel clerk, a secretary–or, when she and her comrades leave San Francisco for Los Angeles, a jazz musician, face blacked up and instrument case full of weapons. I see her looking at the traffic on the freeway, playing with the radio, always the radio, hearing revolutionary subtexts in the songs and sympathetic propaganda in the interference between broadcast areas; then, cruising round Watts and Compton, seeing the ruined houses and the gutted buses, thinking:
Yes, this is the Zone, and it's begun, the final uprising, the crisis, the denouement.

I understand she has to miss it, like a lead player wandering offstage in some anxious dream and getting waylaid among props and curtain-ropes. There's a
correctness
in her decision tom
go shopping for provisions just before the police swoop on the house with armoured cars; and in the way she hears it, on the radio (where else?); and the way she checks into a Disneyland motel and turns the TV on to see the house go up in flames, one of her friends run out and have her lungs ripped from her chest by bullets, blood shoot backwards from another's head, the rest burning inside, the angle changing slightly with each channel. I picture her biting her hand to stifle screams, the make-up running down her face, her body bouncing on the bed, and think: this is the Patty Hearst I want to fuck–not the chat-show guest or irony-trophy movie extra she became, but this one here. I want to fuck this one because this one's America: all of it, sitting in a motel bedroom, watching the apocalypse on television.

Tim's mouth finally shuts. He's said what he came to say and, now that it's said, he understands: he's made a bad mistake. Kurt stands up from the bar and faces him. The guys drinking with Kurt, their faces go hard and cold, and they stand up too. They're all the same, all like Kurt: big and beery and mean. Country mean, slit-eyed mean. Desert mean.
Yeah,
Kurt says, and comes for him. Tim ought to run, but things are happening too quickly, and he's still a little–a lot–drunk, and then Kurt's right in front of him, and it's too late. Kurt's friends don't move. Like they know he doesn't need any help, this time. Why would he? Tim looks like the man he is: a skinny guy who doesn't work out and who doesn't make money with his hands and his muscles. He couldn't be more different from these men. He doesn't do his drinking at the Sawdust Bar. He's not tanned into creases and leather. He doesn't use too much hair gel, doesn't go drinking in steel-toed work boots or blue jeans with paint crusted across the thighs. One of Kurt's hands grabs up the front of Tim's shirt shirt in a knot, and any courage Tim might have had a few seconds ago–it wasn't much–drains right out the soles of his feet, when Kurt pulls him up off them, one armed. Kurt's other hand squeezes Tim's chin. Tim thought he could do this with resilience. With guts, a little guile. He's smarter than Kurt. He's in
the right. Those things ought to matter. On the way over to the Sawdust he imagined himself striding through the parking lot, into the bar, saying what he had to say. Jabbing a finger into Kurt's chest. Then what? He'd kick Kurt in the balls. He'd pick up a beer bottle or a pool cue. Stand over Kurt's whimpering body and say
Don't call her again.
But now Kurt's hand on his chin is rough and solid and unyielding as granite. Kurt's eyes squint.
You,
he says,
are fucked.
And Tim believes him. He's made plenty of other mistakes in his life, and it could fairly be said that sleeping with Kurt's girl was a big one, but this, this is the worst he could do: driving more than a little drunk down back streets into Sparks, to the Sawdust Bar, wobbling into the dark stinking insides, finding Kurt, who he'd only ever seen in pictures, and then saying what he said–
Leave her alone, Kurt
–watching Kurt nodding to himself, finishing his beer, not even looking up, while Tim went on like a dumbfuck–
Kathy's a good woman, she deserves better, so just leave her the fuck alone, let her live her life
–seeing a weird energy in Kurt, a tense set to his shoulders, like this is what he's been hoping for all night, every night: for the guy Kathy's slept with to show up in front of him. For a chance to slam down his bottle on the bar and stand up and let that crazy look take over his square, tanned face. To grab Tim's shirt and grunt into his face what he does now:
Who the fuck are you?
Like he's been practising it. He's so obviously deranged, meanness and hatred swinging out from his eyes like a slap, that Tim answers him, stupidly:
I'm Tim Randall.
Like Kurt gives any little shit. Tim sees in Kurt's eyes: he will always and forevermore be nothing but the skinny little faggot who fucked Kathy. Whatever he was before coming through the door, that's over now. And what is he, anyway? He's Timothy Brian Randall. A name that says
nothing at all: no promise, nothing exceptional. Look at him. He's thirty years old and he works in a clothing store. He's not simply a worker there, but he's not quite a manager either. He has a key to the register but not to the safe. He's well dressed because of the job, but because of that job he'll never be cool. He lives in Reno in an old hotel called Archer's Nugget, not a casino like the seven other Nuggets in town, though you can go downstairs and play video poker at the bar, which is where Tim does his drinking and which is where, a few weeks back, he made the first of the many mistakes that would lead him to this last one. Where he started drinking with Kathy.
Sit down,
he said to her.
What can I get you?
She said,
You don't have to buy me a drink
. He said,
No, but I really want to.
If he'd left out the
really.
Kurt's breathing hisses between his tight pale lips. The bar at Archer's Nugget is done up in old plush red velvet and the people who drink in there are almost all residents most of them elderly folks, Old Reno, wearing string ties and beehive hairdos, Old Reno afraid to walk outside into New Reno, which is new and young and clueless and mostly from California. Like Tim. Kurt's not Old or New Reno. He's Country. He's desert-dry. Hard-eyed like a lizard. Tim knows from Kathy: Kurt drives a pick-up truck and hates Mexicans and on weekends drives up on to Peavine Peak with his friends to shoot old refrigerators. He works out obsessively and likes Toby Keith and would be in the Marines if he didn't have one leg shorter than the other. He's also got a tiny dick. Kathy told him that, too. Kurt swings Tim one hundred and eighty degrees and starts to give him the bum's rush around the end of the bar where there's a door under a half-lit sign that says only IT.
A teeny, tiny, little dick.
The small of Tim's back hits the doorknob. The bartender's looking away, a little smile: help's not
coming. For the first time in Tim's life he's going to get a full-on beating. Maybe worse. Kurt's capable, Tim can feel it in his hands, in the speed they're travelling. And Tim goes limp. He gives in. He feels like he's behind the wheel of a car spinning out of control on ice.
I worry sometimes he might kill me,
Kathy said.
I know he's hit other girls
. Girls, she said, like she's still one herself, like there aren't grown-up consequences for what she's done. Cold air now, they're out the door and into a dark lot which, like the bar itself, is under an overpass, so dark Tim can barely see Kurt's sneering face. Kathy lay down next to Tim in his bed, in his tiny room on the third floor of Archer's Nugget. He woke up from a nap to the sound of her key in the door. He'd been dreaming of the devil, in whom he doesn't believe, leering at him; he almost screamed. Then she was in the room. Perfume, almost peppery.
It's OK
, she said,
I have a key, I'm sorry, I didn't know where to go right now.
They'd shared, at that time, not much. A conversation or two. A couple of beers. Six weeks ago, he walked into her office in the lobby to pay his weekly rent. He knew her then only as the gorgeous woman he handed his cheque to, who smiled at him because it was her job. But this time he saw she'd been crying. She said,
Hi, Tim
, and he was surprised she even knew his name; women like her historically didn't.
You OK?
he asked.
You're a guy
, she said.
Listen to this.
She played him a message from the answering machine on her desk. He was a guy; he was reminded every time he saw Kathy, paying his rent. She's tall, lush, she has long rust-red hair. Wears too much make-up. A dark line drawn around her glistening lips. Wide green eyes, a big white smile. Very smart black suits with low necklines. Freckles on her breastbone. All Tim knew about her then was that he guessed she had some self-esteem, to be working in that office, when she
could make twice her pay as a cocktail waitress a few streets over.
Listen
, she said, and pressed the button. And then the voice of Kurt.
Come here, asshole
, he says to Tim now, even though Tim's already clutched close enough to him to smell the beer on his breath.
Kath
, Kurt said on the machine.
Kath, I don't know about this. It's too much. All right? I mean, you're great, you are, but–look, I don't know. I just don't know.
Tim sat in the office with Kathy, patting her hand while she cried.
Sounds final to me
, he said, like he knew what the fuck he was talking about. She said,
I just I love him, and I mentioned it would, you know, be nice to have a house, a place of our own, and I was so stupid, I said, imagine you and me, living like that, and Kurt got all like stiff and then this and I
–And Tim said,
Hey, would a drink help? My treat?
And then three weeks and a few beers later she's sitting on the edge of his bed, she's opened his door with her key.
I trust you
, she says. She kicks off her shoes.
Don't get up
, she says.
I just need a cuddle.
A cuddle. Tim slips his arm around her. He's never been with a woman in this bed. He hasn't slept with any woman anywhere since leaving California. Since Becky left him. Since in her wake he moved from Sacramento to the Biggest Little City in the World and rented a room in Archer's Nugget and got a job selling off-the-rack suits. Why Reno? Why not? He had to go someplace, and Becky never liked it here. He had, did, does: the desert and the mountains and the skies going orange at dusk. The gaudy Christmas-light sparkle of the downtown. Putting a quarter in a slot machine, to see whether the breakfast he just ate came for free. The prospect of some kind of story, some kind of adventure. Luck touching his shoulder a second time in his life. A sound comes out of Kurt's throat now, a rising growl, and Tim's going even faster. Kurt drives him backwards into one of the pillars of the overpass.
Harder than Tim's ever hit anything. His head cracks against the concrete and the world goes tilted. He's fucked. Tim would hit Kurt now if he could but everything's fuzzy and sideways and he can't clench his fists. Kurt whispers at his ear, intimate like a girl in a bed, but the words make no sense, his head's full of a white light like a new-struck match.
He left me for—good
, Kathy says, in his arms. Cuddling.
He's in Lovelock now. Probably with that bitch Luann. I was sad, and then I remembered what you said the other day. You're right. I can do anything I want, I'm free.
He did say that. It's true.
There's no reason I can't be here
, she says.
I spent my wole life doing what people want. What Kurt wants. But what if I want you? There's no law against it.
Her breath is hot and damp, the breath of tears. Her skirt sizzles across her stockings.
I'm not going to say his name again,
she says. A few minutes later they're both naked below the waist, she's running a lacquered nail up and down the length of him, his head full of light, and she says,
Kurt's got a teeny, tiny dick. I pretended I didn't care.
Kurt drops him to the ground, into cold wet muck. Tim can't see him. Kurt kicks him: a stabbing pain in his ribs, but distant. Like something he dreams. Steel-toed boots. It hurts far away and up close: worse than he can do anything about. Kathy lifts Tim's hand and slips it between her legs. He shouldn't be thinking of Kathy. He should be thinking of Becky. His wife. Now that his life's over: the love of his life.
You're a shit
, Becky says to him. She has to say it; he cheated on her. The old song: a girl at the office. Twenty-two and half-Korean and a sad newlywed, who, one night, after Tim said,
No marriage is easy
, asked him,
Yours too?
He lied, said
Yes
, and all of a sudden it was the truth. Becky's right, she always was. He's a shit. He pledged his life to her. He meant it. She came down the aisle and he would have
given her the bleeding heart from his chest instead of a ring. Words. Kurt kneels next to him and says,
That bitch. You? You?
Every time he says
you
he slaps down at Tim's face.
Jesus, Kathy, some little faggot shit like this? Huh?
A shit, he says. Everyone's of the same mind. Tim curls on his side in the muck. When he was a kid he used to want to be an astronomer. He had a telescope. Saw the Pleiades. But then he realised it was all just math. Then he wanted to be a politician, but he can't speak in public; his knees shake. He studied in business. At least he could make money. At least he could love, could settle down. Then he wanted to be married, to Becky, with her little horn-rim glasses and her thick, black hair and her crooked smile. He loved her. Not enough. He whispered to a friend about the girl at work, who was getting complicated, and the friend tapped the picture of Becky on his desk and said,
Show me a pretty woman, and I'll show you a man who's tired of fucking her.
But Tim wasn't tired of it, he never was. Then that girl in his office put his hand to her breast, said,
Keep me company
, and it seemed like not very much to ask, not very much to do, he told himself just this once, he had a choice and he made it, and now he's not married any more and not one of these women loves him, and he doesn't believe in much of anything except drinking in the bar of the Nugget, and drinking more up in his room, like tonight, opening a bottle of whiskey and thinking of Kathy naked on the same bed where he sat, Kathy whispering in his ear, Kathy who the night before stood in the doorway of his room saying,
It was just a mistake, a big mistake,
and Kurt kicks his thigh and it goes numb, and then something else, like a rush of wind, and there's a long empty pause with nothing in his head but the sound of his own gasps, and then ending it is another match-strike and then his mouth is full of
blood, his head full of cotton and nails and Kathy says,
Kurt's taking me back
, like she's done something wrong and needs to be forgiven, and then she says
I was wrong, he wasn't with Luann, so, um, I was kind of cheating
, he's trying to spit out a breath through the blood, Kathy says,
It was really nice, you're really nice
, her face closed off, closed down, but that first night in his room, she's gasping, skirt hitched around her waist and bunched in his hands and she kisses him long and deep and tastes like rum and tears and says,
You're better than he was, you're better in every way