This Must Be the Place: A Novel (3 page)

But his appetite, and his fledgling good mood, evaporated the moment Arthur Rook stepped inside the Xanadu of Southern California fast food. White-capped workers buzzed with efficiency, their red aprons held together with large wicked safety pins; customers casually
ordered items that weren’t even on the menu (a double-double? a Flying Dutchman?). The restaurant was tiled like a bathroom or a hospital, bright red and clean white, and rows of red palm trees marched across the walls, the rims of the drink cups, the paper place mats lining the trays. Everyone else knew what to do but him; everyone had a place here but Arthur, the out-of-joint socket, the improper cog in this beautifully humming machine. And now he was at the counter and the girl behind it was smiling broadly, and behind her another happy worker was murdering potatoes with a diabolical contraption that was half guillotine, half garlic press. The giant silver handle came down on a naked potato, and it splintered into pale fingers.

“What can I get for you, sir?”

I do not belong in this place.

His eyes flew to the hand-painted menu above her head. Hamburger, cheeseburger. No other options. No one else had ordered just a hamburger or a cheeseburger. Would they know, could they tell, if he tried to fake it?

“Sir?” The girl at the register was stunning. Everyone in LA was beautiful, even the girls at the In-n-Out. It made him sad, and he didn’t know why.

Arthur opened his mouth but nothing came out.

“Sorry, I didn’t catch that.”

The machine was slowing. He, Arthur the interloper, was screwing it up. He had a sudden violent premonition that it was too late for him to escape. He would be crushed by this city, eaten, and then forced to wander it forever: nameless and alone in an undead town.

“He’ll have a double-double and an order of animal fries.”

It was a girl’s voice, behind him: strong and bright and sure. It continued. “And I’ll have a two-by-three and a Neapolitan shake.”

The voice stepped beside him and smiled, and the lonely Watcher, invisible for so long, was seen at last.

Seen by a beautiful girl—a woman. Maybe twenty-five. Tall, like him, with straight dirty-blond hair and wide open eyes and broad shoulders. She had a geometric body, all angles and planes and edges except for her breasts—large breasts that Arthur, at the same time as appreciating the hell out of them, imagined she might have hidden under
sweatshirts and oversize flannel shirts for years. The way she held herself now felt new and unpracticed, as if she had only recently learned how to be at ease but had learned it and learned it well. Arthur smiled at her like a man granted his dying wish. The machine around them began to purr again, and he opened his mouth but still nothing came out.

“Don’t mention it,” she whispered.

That was how Arthur Rook met Amy Henderson. Amy, who would sit down with him at a table in the sun, who would explain the difference between a double-double and a Flying Dutchman and then wipe a dot of ketchup from the corner of his mouth with her left fingertip. Who would teach him how to navigate, how to survive, how to fall in love with LA’s charmingly daft will—finding its resolve to exist for its own superficial sake perfectly romantic and not a terminal fool’s dying delusion. Who would teach him to fall in love with her. Who would be his friend and his lover and then his wife, who would be his home, who could create life from metal and rubber and wires for the sake of a few frames of film, and who would, at 7:48 on a Friday morning in early October, send ten thousand volts from the tip of the same finger that had wiped the ketchup from his lips through all the chambers of her heart.

Amy, who would be killed instantly.

Amy, who would make Arthur Rook a widower at thirty-two.

“Hey, Arthur, your phone.” Between students, Max jerked his head at Arthur’s coat, draped over an open equipment trunk. “Been ringing like crazy.”

Arthur set down his empty coffee cup and flipped his cell phone open. He had ten missed calls.

Of the ten calls missed, there was only one message, left by Amy’s boss, Stantz. His real name was Bill Bittleman, but he loved
Ghostbusters
and wanted everyone to call him Stantz—everyone Amy worked with loved at least one movie like a religion; they loved movies, period, but there was always one movie above the rest. Bill Bittleman’s was
Ghostbusters
.

“Arthur, I’m so sorry—oh, Christ, Arthur, I’m so sorry,” said Stantz’s message. “Call me. Call me on . . . this phone, this number, I
couldn’t find your number so I looked it up on Amy’s . . . phone. Call me
immediately
. Where
are
you?”

Arthur was cold. Freezing.

His fingertips were numb when he redialed Amy’s number. Her picture appeared on the tiny screen of his phone: Amy with Ray Harryhausen draped across her shoulders like a fur wrap—a very alive, very pissed-off wrap.

Why was Stantz using Amy’s phone?

“Arthur!” shouted Stantz. “Arthur, I—I don’t know how to tell you this.”

Bill’s voice cracked. Bill was crying.

“It was an accident,” Stantz said. “It was just a stupid accident, a stupid—”

Arthur heard a high whine. The sound of crystal vibrating.

Arthur was lying in bed in the dark, under the covers, fully clothed. His sneakers were still on and his mouth tasted like tin. He couldn’t remember Max dropping him off after work. He didn’t remember if he’d fed Harryhausen. He kept more regular hours than Amy, so feeding the cat was his—responsibility—

Arthur was standing in the shower. A freezing cold shower. He was resting his head against the tile in the corner, and when he stood back, he felt a ridge pressed into the skin of his forehead. His throat was sore. His hand—hurt—Jesus, what did he do to his hand? His knuckles were raw and stung, bloody, under the cold spray from the showerhead. He turned off the water and stepped out of the shower and there were little red polka dots all over the bathroom sink, and Arthur saw that someone had punched the bathroom mirror. It hadn’t shattered but it was cracked in one corner and dangling off the cabinet’s glide track.

He wrapped a towel around himself and opened the door.

Ray Harryhausen was lying in the middle of the hallway, his furry bulk puddling over his paws so that he looked like a striped brick with a cat’s head.

“Are you hungry?” Arthur asked him. “Did I feed you? Huh, Harry?”

Harryhausen, who tended to be either inert or asleep, wasn’t exactly behaving oddly by lying in the middle of the hallway, but something was wrong about it. Something was wrong about
him
. Arthur and Harry had never liked one another—Harry was really Amy’s cat, had been her roommate for years before Arthur came along—

Amy’s cat—

Harryhausen made a horrible, horrible noise and Arthur sank to the carpet on his knees. Everything that had happened that day, everything he lost, flooded back as a nightmare: Max driving him to the hospital, to the morgue. Standing there while Stantz, red-faced, explained that Amy had blown a fuse while working on an armature and went back to the breaker and there was a wire—that was old or stripped—Arthur couldn’t understand, didn’t want to—wires were crossed. Electrons flew. Into the tip of her finger (her left index, he had kissed it a thousand times) and up her forearm (pale underside, purple veins) and through her bicep, her shoulder. Straight down into her heart.
Fibrillated
, they said.

Fibrillated.

Stantz kept talking—about the sound and the blowback and the smell—and Max told him to shut
the hell
up, and the morgue was cold, and Amy was blue and dull and not-Amy. Her left hand was angry and swollen. Burned.

Did she have a will?

I don’t know, Arthur said. She liked grapefruit and coffee together for breakfast.

Did she want to be buried or cremated?

I don’t know, he said.

She wore his old concert T-shirts to bed and sang him lullabies as Axl Rose (
Good night to the jungle, baby!
) and Mick Jagger (
Hey! You! Get into my bed!
).

Any family?

All gone, he said. Just me. Just her and me.

What would you like to do with the body?

Max took him home—Max took him home and got him into bed
and Arthur was pretty sure Max held his hand for a while and kissed him on the forehead—and then Max left.

Harryhausen made the horrible noise again. Arthur had never heard him cry before. Complain and hiss, sure, but this was completely different. This was deep and wild; it sounded like he was scraping it from the bottom of his tiny cat lungs. Like it was tearing his throat open.

Arthur sat on the carpet and stretched his legs out in front of him, in the hall, in the dark, and dripped cold water out of his hair and down his bare chest and tried to swallow but he didn’t have any spit. He ached.

He lurched forward and his body tried to vomit but there was nothing in his stomach. Harryhausen jumped to his feet, hissing, and padded away, enormous fuzzy gut swaying from side to side.

Arthur didn’t know anything. He didn’t know if Amy wanted to rest in the ground or flame out into a million tiny particles. He didn’t know if she’d made a will, or if there was an object, a memory, she wanted carried on by someone else in her name.

He didn’t know and he was never
going
to.

He had to be dreaming. None of this was even remotely possible. He was thirty-two. Amy was thirty-one. They were young and full of blood. Their bodies and their minds were still their own to control. He couldn’t imagine Amy—her body, Amy’s body—lit with electricity. Had she flown? Had she fallen? Had she looked like she was dancing?

She liked to dance.

Of course
Amy hadn’t made out a will, it was too soon—but he didn’t know that, not for certain. And just because she might not have officially left a will didn’t mean Amy didn’t want certain things done or said or given after her death. Just because Arthur didn’t know what Amy wanted him to do with her body didn’t mean
Amy
didn’t know.

Why hadn’t she told him?

Why hadn’t he asked?

What else didn’t he know?

What else hadn’t he—the Noticer, the Watcher, the Good Seer of so many strangers—not known about his wife? What had he missed? What could he still see, if he looked hard enough?

He pressed his back against the wall for leverage and slowly, gently, pressed himself up from the floor. He blinked back stars. He could do this—if he, Arthur Rook, could see anything, he could see his wife. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t here. He could see.

He started in the bedroom. He looked through her dresser and saw her yellow-and-black striped socks, her grandfather’s enormous green sweater, the blue lace bra she wore on their third anniversary that made her pale skin glow. He smelled Amy all around, but he didn’t see anything he didn’t know. He looked under the bed and saw her purple bowling shoes, also the white open-toed pumps she named Marilyn (left) and Norma Jean (right). He looked in the bathroom, in the broken medicine cabinet and the hamper. He tossed razor blades she would never use and unopened tubes of toothpaste and dirty clothes on the floor, and still he didn’t see anything. Arthur was slowly drying from his shower but he was cold, only wearing a towel, and shaking so viciously his teeth chattered in his skull. He ran to the kitchen and looked in every cabinet and in the refrigerator, and all he saw were the plates they had bought together, the cups and the bowls they’d eaten ice cream and cereal and hot soup from. An unfinished gallon of milk, leftover Thai take-out, half a grapefruit swaddled in plastic wrap that she’d been saving for breakfast tomorrow. Arthur saw all these things but he did not see Amy—only trace evidence of what she’d worn, what she’d eaten, what her body had done.