Unsoul'd (24 page)

"Look, if you let a guy like MacCarter get his hands on it, he's going to take out everything that is uniquely
you
and replace with the standard Hollywood junk. Because that's what he does. That's why they love him. He'll probably give the fucking thing a happy ending. But what's great about your book is that it's a downer, Randall. It's a really, really
amazing
downer. And sometimes we need that. Because life is like that, and we need a book that isn't a downer for its own sake, but just because life is."

Holy shit. Finally. Finally, someone
got it
. She was right. She knew it; she nailed it. I could stay. I could keep the movie pure and honest and--

And I thought of my pitiful bank balance.

"Maybe... Maybe when my royalties come in, early next year..."

She snorted and rolled into me. "You can stay here. Don't worry about that. Even if you don't write the screenplay, you can keep a hand on the movie, work on your new book..."

"Are you asking me to move in with you?"

She shrugged. "If you're amenable."

Just that phrase was enough, it seemed, to cause a lurch in my genitals.

"You don't think that's--"

"--too fast? Too soon? There's no such thing. I'm not asking you to marry me. I like you. I like fucking you. And I'm not some insecure party girl, Randall -- I know you like me and I know you like fucking me."

"'Like' might not be a strong enough word."

"So what's the big deal? You come live here. Work on your shit. I'll work on my shit. We'll fuck our eyeballs out. And we'll get to know each other. Absolute worst-case scenario -- it doesn't work out and we both had some great sex."

"When you put it that way..."

"I just need to know one thing. Seriously."

"What's that?"

"Have you ever jerked off while thinking about me?" Kiki asked.

"What?" I said, chiefly because it had the benefit of being neither the truth nor a lie.

"Did you ever jerk off while thinking about me? I have to wonder that, now. Any guy I'm with." She sat up, gloriously and unselfconsciously not draping herself in the blanket. In the half-light, she appeared sculpted, not built of tissue and bone. "I won't be angry. I'm just curious, is all."

I thought back to my fantasy from what now seemed so long ago, a lifetime, even though it was only a few months at the most. Kiki and Fi...

"The fact that you haven't answered tells me everything I need to know." She scowled at me. "I don't
care
. I just want to know if you have the guts to--"

"It's not that," I told her. "It was just once. I just--"

"Only once?" she teased. "I must be losing it."

"No! No. It's... It was just once."

"So," she said, snuggling against me again, "what did I do to you? Or what did you do to me, you naughty boy?"

"Kiki--"

"I want to know. Seriously, unless it was, like, necrophilia or you had me fuck a horse, I don't care. I'm really just curious."

"It's not
that
. Gross. No, I just..."

"Tell me, Randall," she said in a tone that was so commanding and so insistent that I had no choice.

I wimped out. I went vague. "It wasn't just you and me. It was a threesome."

She laughed. "Is
that
what you feel all guilty about? Oh my God. Were you raised Catholic? How can you feel guilty about
that
? God, Randall -- I had my first threesome in
high school
. That's no big deal."

"Well, OK."

"Who was it with?"

"Does it matter?"

"Not at all. I'm just curious."

I invent things for a living -- people, places, stories. But in that moment, I was powerless to lie to her. "It was Fiona."

"Who's Fiona?" She sat up. "Wait --
my
Fiona? My agent?"

"She--"

"Oh my God! That's right! You guys dated. I totally forgot."

I shouldn't have been shocked that she knew -- of course Fi would have mentioned it, probably the very moment that Kiki insisted on ditching the MGM deal to star in
Flash/Back
.

"This was
months
ago," I hastened to tell her. "I didn't know you. I didn't know I ever
would
know you. I totally--"

She leaned back, grinning. "Wow. What are the odds, right?"

"You're not angry?"

"Why would I be angry?" In her eyes, I could see that she genuinely couldn't imagine any reason to be angry. "Like you said -- you didn't know. The whole thing is some crazy coincidence."

I thought of the devil. And I wondered.

Her lips at my ear, she whispered. "And besides... I bet I could arrange that."

My life may have flashed before my eyes.

"I don't know," I said, struggling not to whimper. "Fi and me... It was a pretty definitive split."

"She owes me. I can be very persuasive. And even if I can't--" she licked the shell of my ear "--I know people a
lot
hotter than Fi."

Wherein I Go to a Hell of My Own Making

My tour wended its way back east. A six-hour plane flight became a week-long odyssey through Chicago, Detroit, Houston, and Pittsburgh. By the time I landed at JFK, I struggled to resist the urge to crouch, Pope-like, and kiss the ground.

The devil was my chauffeur. He held up a sign with my name in Baggage Claim.

"So you're really doing it, eh?" he asked. "You're really gonna move out to L.A. and ride the Kiki Newman Express to the big life in Hollywoodland."

"We'll see what happens." I should have just told him off and tried to snag a modicum of sleep. The ride from JFK to my particular corner of Brooklyn never took less than an hour, regardless of traffic, time of day, or day of the week. I could have used that hour. But I was so frazzled that I couldn't stop myself from engaging with him.

"I can tell you what will happen. I've seen it a million times before. Are you ready for your picture splattered all over the tabloids? Are you ready to see
Access Hollywood
run shitty, grainy video of yourself running out for a latte?"

"Kiki has a pretty good handle on the paparazzi."

"She has a pretty good handle on your
crank
, is what she has."

"Get it out of your system."

The devil clucked his tongue. "I just never thought I'd see the day when a good, virtuous East Coast boy such as yourself would decamp for the filthy modern-day Gomorrah that is Hollywood. And believe me, Randy, I know from Gomorrah."

"Of course you do." I was weary of him already. I'd
been
weary of him and his too-cool, hipster bullshit for a long, long time. I wished in that moment that he would just take my fucking soul and disappear and let me get on with my life.

"You're not really going to write the screenplay, are you? You think signing a contract with me is soul-draining... Wait until you see the screenwriting process out there. You'll be begging for fire and brimstone. No lie. No shit."

"Is that really what it's like? When I die?"

"I really don't care what happens to you when you die, Randall."

"Well, anyway, I'm not writing the screenplay. I'm just going to spend a few days with Del to hammer out some stuff. Then, don't worry, I'll be right back to working on your precious novel. It's almost finished."

"It's not my novel, Randy. It's yours. Do with it as you please."

But for a moment -- just a moment -- I forgot that the creature sitting in the driver's seat wasn't a human being. For that moment -- maybe I was tired; maybe he was -- I saw him as a person. Read him like a person.

Writers are good at deducing behavior. We have an intuitive sense of lies and the hidden.

In that moment, I was convinced that the devil was lying to me. That he was worried.

Do with it as you please
.

No. He didn't want that. He wanted that book done.

We pulled up to my apartment and the devil popped the trunk for my suitcase. "Aren't you going to help me up the stairs with it?" I asked.

"I just drive the car, buddy," he said.

"Fuck you, Satan," I said with heat, and he took off into the Brooklyn night.

I hauled the suitcase up the stairs and into my apartment, which I hadn't seen in weeks.

Still, though absence may blur one's memory, I was reasonably certain that the gigantic, writhing mass in the middle of the kitchen floor hadn't been there when I left. At first, it seemed to be a single, gelatinous accretion, plated with shiny black pustules, but as stragglers broke off and scrambled around the mound for better access, I saw it for what it was: a swarm (or maybe two swarms) of ants and cockroaches, crawling over and around each other, a throbbing, heartbeat-like tumor of grotesque right in my apartment. I stared at it -- it made a strange sound, the sound of hundreds of cockroach and ant legs as an off-beat percussion. There are no similes or metaphors for that sound; it is what it is and it defies poetry.

It was a symptom of my unique, soul-mortgaged (soul-in-hock?) position in the world, I suppose, that my immediate assumption was that I had just gone to hell (thou cannot say "Fuck you, Satan" with impunity?) and my particular torture would involve creepy-crawlies of all sorts. I thought of an old childhood nightmare, bolstered by some reality... I had woken up one night with a fat spider glimmering in the dark air above me, almost silver in my nightlight, its thread impossibly slender and tremulous. I held my breath, terrified to breathe, lest the vibrations of my breath break that strand and send it tumbling onto my face...into my mouth...

For months afterward, I nightmared bugs scrambling over me, crawling into my mouth and down my gullet, where I could feel them scrambling about in my stomach. I slept face-down, my mouth tightly closed, breathing only through my nose.

This old childhood tableau flashed through me in the moment it took for a portion of the roaches to scatter at my presence. The ants remained, along with a sizable minority of the roaches, perhaps hardened and bolstered by my long absence.

I wasn't in hell. I was just in my kitchen. Which was infested. Beyond infested -- it had been invaded. Bugs had metastasized there.

And yet, a part of me wanted only to crawl into bed. A tired, tired part of me. To that part, it made perfect sense just to deal with this in the morning.
They've been here for God knows how long
, that part whispered
, and they seem confined to the kitchen. Go get some sleep and--

I stomped on two roaches scurrying away from what I now realized was a fetid mash of rotten chicken, old tomatoes, and something slick and glistening that -- after a moment -- I recognized as a combination of honey and chocolate sauce.

Manda. My text. She had a key to my apartment. Hell, she was probably
in
my apartment when I texted her. More than a week ago.

I had trouble being angry at her, given the circumstances.

I remembered a spray can of bug killer under the kitchen sink. Crushing bugs as I went, I picked my way to the cabinet. I emptied the entire can onto the pile like a Vietnam-era soldier with a canister of napalm strapped to his back, and took a grim, godly satisfaction in watching the bugs twitch and scatter and die. The ants perished quickly and easily. The roaches stumbled around, drunk. Some I took pity on and crushed under my heel. Others I watched with the sort of clinical detachment only exhaustion can bring. It was like a strange sort of nature documentary.

When all were dead and scattered, I cleaned up the kitchen floor, the sickly sweet smell of a thick layer of bug-killer blunting the reek of decaying food. Then I showered and made a cursory check of the rest of the apartment -- it was small and took little time.

Fortunately, Manda had left no other surprises for me; the rest of the apartment was intact and unmolested, a restraint I'm not sure I'd've shown in similar circumstances.

By then, I was hopped up on adrenaline and righteous, bug-killing God-wrath. Still, I fell asleep in seconds.

Face down. Mouth closed.

Just in case.

Wherein I Make the Move

A few days after the bug incident (for those few days, I still spied the stray roach or ant, but no second bug apocalypse was necessary), my apartment was in boxes. It took a depressingly short amount of time to pack up my belongings. My furniture wouldn't be making the trip west. I somehow couldn't see my very Brooklyn, very vintage secondhand shop treasures mixing and matching with Kiki's cool, restrained ultramodern furnishings. Pointless to try. It was all being sold online as I finished up the packing.

I had considered calling Manda. The way I'd broken up with her, the way I'd just discarded her was unseemly at best, assholish at worst. And I suspected I was leaning toward the latter. An apology was in order, or at least some sort of explanation.

But I realized/decided that a woman enraged enough to leave a pile of festering food as bug-bait on your kitchen floor was probably one also uninterested in apology or explanation. I didn't think it would make much of a difference to her if I explained that I'd thought I was soulless when I'd sent that text. It was a good excuse -- a perfectly reasonable one, for me -- but I couldn't expect her to believe. I pictured the devil lounging in my desk chair (the one piece of furniture not packed or sold or covered with boxes) and saying, "Well, you know what has no fury like that of a woman scorned, Randy!" Or something similar.