The Fading (26 page)

He’d long ago stopped trying to convince her to find something administrative, office work, a courier, anything that did not
entail hose and garters, the short ruffled skirts, serving drinks and hot dogs to weenies in knock-off Brooks Bros. Knew she
was smoking weed on her breaks, on her way home after work. Knew she was drinking during her shifts, in the morning before
her shifts. Knew she was lingering at the casinos for an hour, two, sometimes all night instead of home, and why might that
be?

At the three-year mark he found her art-school pipe. Tinfoil in the guest house’s bathroom trashcan. Chasing the dragon, chasing
the dream.

Because this scene, their lives, this shithole guest house in a dirt-floor backyard was too depressing to look at. You could
live in it, so long as you didn’t see it. A hundred and seven degrees out, a swimming pool
everywhere, just not here. Paycheck to paycheck, no one’s cooking dinner, can’t afford to go out. Room service scraps, you
cut off the bite marks and put it in a styrofoam carton, microwave for one minute on HI.

He worked nights, she worked days. Both on the Strip but not in the same building, might as well have been living on other
planets. Crossing paths on the way to the bathroom, between drunks, I feel like I used to know you, don’t any more, and that
hurts too much to really dwell upon, so let’s just don’t. I have to get up early and go to work. My ankles feel like hammered
ore, my spine’s still twitching from the dexies and mop work. I think I’m gonna watch some more TV and get my head together,
be in soon, night-night.

Three years in, the question becomes not, how much longer can we do this? But what were we doing in the first place? Was that
even real? Is this even real? Are you for real? He wished none of it was real.

I could make, like, six hundred a night dancing. Julie said that. Just a couple months ago. She said that.

He didn’t say anything in response.

Now really, Noel. This had gone on longer than Julie was in college. She didn’t think it was ever going to come back. She
had begun to talk of leaving, making a new plan, starting over somewhere else. Monthly road trips back to Calabasas to see
her mother, she said. LA boyfriend, Noel suspected.

Had seen her laughing in the casino one night with a guy holding her up at a blackjack table, handing her chips, whispering
in her ear. Clean, conservative, black
suit, good hair. A little older, stable, a man drinking a scotch, in command of the table. Double-down, baby. Go ahead, it’s
only money. Come up to my room later. Maybe she went. Maybe not. But it didn’t matter. The road they were on, it was crash
and burn. Or the long slow burn before the crash.

Where was his fucking cell? Why couldn’t he trigger it? Why was it resisting him this time? Now that he wanted it, why wouldn’t
it come? Was it because they had been happy or because they wanted it so bad? Did we piss off the muse of the erasure?

The downward spiral continued. They argued, fought like middleweights, she threw a lamp at his head. Make-up sex turned to
make-up fighting. He slept on the couch. Dreamed of armed robberies, Reagan and Nixon masks in lieu of a Noel mask.

One day he said, Do you think we should buy a gun?

No, she said, averting her eyes. I don’t think we should buy a gun.

But maybe, he thought, I should buy a gun. Pop into one of the pawn shops, buy a piece with the serial numbskis filed off,
keep it in the closet beside the bed. In case someone comes for me, for us. In case she brings one of those guys from the
casinos home. Keep it under my pillow. In case I need to
use
a gun.

Yeah, but. Whatever you do, don’t tell her about the gun. Don’t tell her about the need for a gun. Don’t tell her what’s eating
you, that you no longer believe the bubble is coming back. That it’s over. You broke its back and there’s no longer anything
whatsoever special about
you, Noel Shaker. You’re just another Vegas shithead who can’t look after his girl. A pimp turning her out, turning tricks
with her hopes, only there’s no money on the nightstand after she goes down on you.

Run away. Tell her you love her, pack your bags, and get her out of the desert.

Save Julie. Save yourself. Get out now.

Tonight.

‘Tonight,’ he said in the back of a cab that smelled like bean burritos and Pine-Sol, and for the umpteenth time he believed
it.

Turned out he was one night too late. Or four years, depending on your perspective.

The cab pulled up at the rim of the cul-de-sac. Noel tipped a buck, ignored the scowl.

He walked around the main house where the lights were never on. It was a big Spanish villa, four or five bedrooms and a dried
swamp pool, in a neighborhood of a hundred others exactly like it, owned by a video producer they had never met because the
video producer, along with his wife and two children, was dead.

At the beginning of year three, Noel and Julie had been driving around looking for cheap rentals, got lost in this better
neighborhood, and happened to meet Nora, the realtor who was handling the estate sale. She’d just finished clearing the yellow
band of police tape from the front door and a cleaning crew was going in with an industrial strength wet-vac and about two
hundred feet of hose.

She hurried over to Julie’s Mustang and asked them if she could help them with something, smelling desperation and a possible
short-term solution to her client’s problem. Namely, that he and the family were dead, the estate was in probate and being
contested by various
creditors, and in this market was not likely to sell for at least a year. She needed a tenant for the guest house to justify
the costs of holding the listing for such a long time. Come have a lookie-loo. Nora gave them a brief tour, offered it for
five hundred a month, ‘a steal for something so secure and private in this zip code’.

When Julie asked what the catch was, Nora mentioned as off-handedly as possible that the house was still ‘unofficially a crime
scene’. The producer, who’d dabbled in straight-to-video D-list action knock-offs featuring former wrestling stars and midgets
and the like, had actually earned the bulk of his income distributing ‘adult cassettes across Las Vegas’s many video and novelty
emporiums’. The aspiring Zodiac’s note suggested a political nutcase who’d taken umbrage with the producer’s pervy contributions
to the world and believed God had sent him to cleanse the neighborhood.

‘The producer was killed?’ Noel asked, more intrigued than unnerved. ‘In that house?’

‘He and his family, yes, a terrible tragedy.’ Nora cleared her throat. ‘I can let you have the guest house for three-fifty
if you don’t stir up any problems. I know it’s not ideal, but if you help me out on this, water the grass and do a few chores,
hold on for at least six months, I can upgrade you to something bigger with less of a, ahem, reputation. What do you say?
I’ll throw in a free cable install.’

It didn’t bother Julie. They’d be living in the guest house after all, not the main house. And they were broke. She wanted
something that bore some resemblance to a
home, not a temporary place to flop. The by-the-week motels were dangerous, filled with junkies and people knocking on the
door at all the wrong hours.

‘We’ll take it,’ Noel told Nora the realtor, and they’d not seen her since, just mailed the rent checks to the office address
she’d given. They’d never even signed a lease, and at the end of the first twelve months, he’d stopped sending the checks.
No one, including Nora, had called or stopped by to evict. Noel suspected a lot of the other houses were vacant, too, thanks
to the recession and high unemployment.

It was quiet here. They’d never had a problem. Except that their entire lives had become a problem.

Noel walked across the backyard of grass gone brown, then to dust, feeling weirdly guilty about not watering and managing
the landscape as he’d promised. In lieu of barbed wire, the cinderblock wall surrounding the property was festooned with decaying
cactus. Thinking of a prison pen for coyotes, he let himself into the guest house. The door was unlocked. All lights were
off, except for the lamp beside the double bed in their empty bedroom.

The air was dead.

Everything felt dead.

He knew before he found the note.

He walked back to the kitchen and flicked on the stove light. He poured and then nursed a deep glass of tequila. When that
was empty, he refilled the glass and went back to the bedroom. She’d left it on the night-stand they’d shared, being able
to afford only the one.

But the note is not the real news, he thought. The news is what you were afraid to tell her. That the big change has already
happened. Is, in fact happening right now. This is your life, and it doesn’t matter who can see you, because you’ve missed
the point and wasted so much of it.

‘I’d really like to meet him,’ he said to the note.

Noel began to work in earnest on the Don Julio Silver. When only two fingers remained, he carried the bottle out onto the
back patio and stared out at the dark outlines of the other houses and rooftops against the softer black sky. He walked to
the side of the guest house, until he could see across the bald yard to the main house some hundred feet away. Mature palm
trees that had been trucked in and planted around the winding brick path connecting the two abodes obstructed his view. A
thicker line of smaller snarling things that could grow in the desert had been planted against the border fence, tracing a
jagged shoulder up to the main house’s back deck. The house’s windows were as dark and lifeless as they had been for the past
fourteen months.

He thought back to the comical scene of Nora, a middle-aged realtor in her blazer and business skirt and sensible heels, extracting
her agency sign from the trunk of her fancy car and trying to beat it into the hard ground. When was the last time he had
seen that For Sale sign, anyway? He couldn’t remember, but he was sure it hadn’t been there tonight. Soon as someone buys
the place, he thought, we will be evicted.

Then he remembered there was no longer a we, just a me. Wouldn’t it be funny if Julie left him and he became homeless in a
span of twenty-four hours? Yes, hilarious. He took another swing, emptying the bottle, and lobbed it into the weeds.

The main house stood against the night, a shadow that did not seem real in any important way, and now a single window light
was on.

Someone had moved in, after all.

Noel stared at the lighted window, thinking about the producer and his wife and their two children. The article he’d found
in the paper, just out of a gnawing but harmless curiosity, mind you, said that Ezra, the eight-year-old boy, had been found
decapitated.

He stared at the house for a long time, then went to bed and passed out at once.

No, we can’t stay. We’ll leave tonight, together
.

This was his first clear thought as he emerged from the placeless swamp of lurid colors and phantom images that constituted
his intoxicated dreams. Emerged, like a sea creature washed up onto the shore of wakefulness by a rogue wave, only to be dragged
back by the undertow of his exhausted mind and the alcohol flushing through his veins, into a shallow slumber.

The front door creaked and her familiar footsteps came down the hall, into the bedroom, and he felt her.

Oh, good. Julie came back. I should wake up now.

He was too tired to move, but not so deep as to resist imagining her stopped in the doorway, watching him
sleep, smelling booze fumes, shaking her head. This is what she had come back for? What if she wanted to talk, or better yet
take him with her? She might have a speech prepared, a short apology for abandoning him. All he had to do was wake up, then
they could get in her car and leave tonight, now. He would drink a quart of convenience store coffee and make the four-hour
road trip to Los Angeles, and together they would wake up in the sun, at her mom’s house, and John would make them breakfast,
give them both another lecture for their foolish waste of four years, but everyone would be happy they had come home. They
would start over, humbled, reborn in the glowing light of family.

But not if he continued to lie here like a besotted bum.

Her footsteps, which were the sound of tennis shoes brushing carpet, moved closer to the bed.

Noel shifted his legs, stretching the muscles and pushing his face into the pillow. He was trying to wake up but the process
required immense reserves of concentration.

The mattress sagged at one corner and the cheap steel bed frame squeaked. The single blanket he had dragged over himself began
to slide along his bare legs, tickling. He couldn’t tell if she was pulling it down or up, if she was trying to wake him or
slide in with him. Maybe she was tired too, and cold, wanting nothing more than to snuggle and be with him until the new day
arrived, sober and bright.