Woke Up Lonely (37 page)

“Which way?” said Charlotte.

“Oh, fuck me,” said Vicki, and again they turned to Anne-Janet.

“What?” she said. “Like I memorized the blueprints? How should I know?”

They went left. They should have gone right.

Eventually, they spotted light slewing beneath a door at the far end of the tunnel. They were accustomed to the dark, so already, from this distance, they had to blink and squint. It seemed possible, for all their left turns, that they were back where they started, in which case a more circumspect fugitive might have hewn to the wall and crept up on the door for the purpose of surveillance. But no. Anne-Janet was too tired to care. She trotted up to the door and gasped for the pain in her foot.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Vicki said. Anne-Janet pressed on.

The door was more vault than door, and locked from the inside. In fact, there was no handle or knob to let them in, just an intercom and button.

“What’s the big deal?” Anne-Janet said. “It looks like a bank.”

“But it’s not,” Charlotte said. “Could be many things, but not a bank. Let’s go, okay?”

“Why?”

“Because,” Vicki drawled, “if you don’t belong here, bad things happen. You need an appointment for every place in the Sub.” And when Anne-Janet pushed for more, they betrayed a brochure’s worth of info, highlights of the Subterrain: Below the Garfield Suites Hotel, a brothel full of Singapore girls, codified by an airline, fetishized by a nation. In the cellar of the Verdin Bell and Clock Museum, access to the operations center of a Deepnet marketplace for counterfeit money and contraband of the month. There was gambling. Ultimate fighting between inmates sprung from Queensgate jail for this purpose. A sweatshop for the sewing of official Major League baseballs, the work farmed out by Rawlings’s Costa Rica factory, where the oft-suspected juicing of the ball occurred. There were maps for sale online, though you had to know where to look, and the maps were not cheap. There were passwords to be bought. Security clearance. There were in the tunnels only people who belonged, attired according to venue, which is why three women in costume (two whores and an electrician) were able to tour the spread unremarked, the consensus of any observers being that they hailed from or were headed to Flaunt, in which you impersonated who you wanted to be and were applauded for it. The Sub was decades old. It had probably started with an underground speakeasy and proliferated from there.

Anne-Janet’s mouth opened, but only for a second. “Oh, come on,” she said, and when the others did not flinch, she said, “You’re saying that beneath the city of Cincinnati is some kind of second city? That’s insane.”

Vicki shrugged. “It’s not. There’s people doing all kinds of ugly shit in back alleys and basements all over the world.”

“This is just a little more organized,” Charlotte said. “A little more high-class.”

Anne-Janet didn’t have time for this nonsense, and so she pressed the button, which cued on the other side of the vault a wind chime followed by static on the intercom and a voice—May I help you?—which came as a relief, because, while Anne-Janet was playing it cool, it did occur to her that this door might in fact be the chthonic maw of snuff videography. Go in and you never came out.

“Fuck,” Vicki said. “I don’t know the entry script for this place.”

“No shit,” Charlotte said. Like anyone knew the script. The script was valued at ten thousand dollars street, assuming you could get it, which you could not.

Anne-Janet bent in close to the intercom and said, “Hi, can you let us in? We’ve been walking for a while and I need a bathroom.”

Charlotte was now cursing volubly. “My ’plasty is in
twenty minutes!
Let’s
go!
”

“You’re not gonna make it,” Vicki said.

Anne-Janet depressed the button again.

“Six months,”
Charlotte was saying. “Free because of some new technique. Like I have health insurance. Like insurance was gonna pay, anyhow.
Six months.
” She slouched to the floor. “I think Thurlow got sick of me because of my labia, okay? It’s one thing to be tossed aside because your man thinks you’re working for the feds, but way worse if he thinks you’re gross. You got off easy.”

Vicki joined her on the floor.

“Hello,” Anne-Janet said. “My friend here is running late—can you just let us in already? Man, oh man, if you only knew who I was.”

“What was I thinking?” Charlotte said. “Why am I even here?” She had her face in her hands. “I’m not a Helix Head. I don’t even care that much if I stay alone. But Lo was just so sweet. Said we’d be like a family. All of us. I don’t know. I’m an idiot.”

Vicki began to rub her back. “You’re not an idiot,” she said. “You’re not.”

“Look,” Anne-Janet said, and she drilled her finger into the button. “I just had the most mortifying experience a person can have with another human being, and I have never felt more self-disgusted in all my life, I might go up in flames for how bad I feel, so please just let me in”—at which point the door began to open with ceremony, inch by inch, so that the light from within came upon them like a benediction.

They sprung to their feet. “Just get a map,” Charlotte said. “If you can. Then we’re out of here.”

There was an anteroom. Carpeting in hues graham cracker and shrimp. A row of plastic chairs bolted to the wall. It resembled a bus depot or processing foyer for the urban sanitarium of last resort. At the desk, behind a glass partition, the intercom lady, in a sports visor and white seersucker tennis dress with red and green piping down the middle and neckline. So perhaps this was a gymnasium. A super-fancy gym.

Charlotte and Vicki huddled against a wall. Outside the purlieus of the Helix House, they had grown shy. Anne-Janet asked for a map. The tennis pro qua receptionist laughed and said, “Just fill out this form and bring it back up to the desk when you’re done.”

“I don’t want a form, I want a map.”

“Most people don’t come through this way. Since you people did, you have to fill out the form. Several, actually.” She closed the glass. It was smudged with handprints (fingers splayed, palms flat) and the imprint of a forehead that together were like a pillory for clients to fit themselves into during a losing encounter with the tennis pro.

Anne-Janet perused the questionnaire. Her first thought: This is not a gym. Her second: Oh, man, this is so not a gym. They wanted to know her age, weight, and emergency contact info; okay. But they also wanted references, a waiver form, and a confidentiality agreement more draconian than your average mortgage contract, plus a brief sexual history (if applicable), an explanation of that history (if applicable), a profile of her sensitive spots and no-no’s (if not submitted in advance), a blood report, and a letter from the client’s referring therapist.

She thrust clipboards at Charlotte and Vicki. Vicki didn’t even look, but Charlotte skimmed it over and, when she was done, seemed even more distressed than before. “We have to get out of here,” she said. “I know what this place is, and we need to go.”

Vicki seemed less convinced. “Yeah, but maybe they can do a ’plasty here, too.”

“Earth to Vicki,” Charlotte said. “The people who come here don’t
need
vaginoplasty.”

“What do you mean? Some people are
born
with big lips. Not every busted lip is because you fucked all the boys in Kansas.”

It was slow dawning for Anne-Janet, but then her ears went cherry at the tips. “So let me get this straight, people come here to, ah—”

“Customize their first time, you got it,” Charlotte said.

“Customize?”
Anne-Janet said. “Whatever happened to flower petals and satin sheets and a real guy saying he loves you, and not just because he wants to ejaculate on your face?”

“No such thing,” said Vicki. “And from what I saw in your cell, I’m guessing you know that, too.”

Anne-Janet just shook her head.

Charlotte poked at her temple with her index. “And anyway, hello, since clearly neither me or Vick is new on the pony, we’re gonna get mistaken for cops or something, and then we’ll turn into you, all kidnapped and stuff, only we won’t get treated half as nice and probably we’ll get shot.”

“Also,” Vicki said, because Anne-Janet’s incredulity was annoying, “it’s no stranger than some john hiring me to do it. Only real diff is that sometimes in here you get daughters of sheiks or whatever who want a controlled experience.”

“A
controlled experience,
” Anne-Janet said, and the lady in her heart—her name was Pollyanna—plucked a rose and died.

The Pro took off her visor and spoke to Anne-Janet. “Okay, you’re all set. If you are amenable to the day’s arrangement, there’s been a cancellation. We can get you in now.”

Anne-Janet stammered. “Oh, no, there’s been a mistake. I didn’t come here for this.”

“What do you mean?” the Pro said, staring at Anne-Janet. If she had a racket in hand, she might well have served out a motivational speech about the game—You don’t choose it, it chooses you—though, in any case, what she did offer amounted to the same thing. She said, “I just read your questionnaire and bio. You know we do revisions, right? We can take you back, re-create the context, and change whatever you didn’t like. So, about your father, not to be rude, but you are so obviously in the right place.”

Anne-Janet’s mouth opened. She looked at the Pro, looked at the hookers.

“Sign here?” the Pro said. And then, to Vicki: “Maybe you both want revisions, too? There’s something here for everyone.”

Charlotte said, “Like virtual reality? Do we get to wear helmets?”

“Okay, this isn’t
Blade Runner,
” the Pro said. “You just describe everything for us, and we will re-create it down to the last detail.”

“Wow,” Vicki said. “My first time. Bradford King. I was fifteen.”

“You remember his name?” Charlotte said. “Mine could have been any one of five guys. Maybe six—who knows who went first that night.”

Anne-Janet continued to look from one face to another. A revision. How horrible. How New Age and barbaric and disclosing of her most awful moment to a set designer and stagehand.

“Yeah, I remember Bradford,” Vicki said. “We all wanted to call him Brad because Bradford was just so serious, but he wouldn’t have it. I remember trying to call him Brad during sex and him just not being able to cum at all and yelling at me for it.”

“Nerves?”

“Beats me. He was nine. Maybe it was too soon.”

Charlotte reached into her purse, as though looking for her wallet, as though in this wallet might be the 20 K it would take to get relaid by five drunken boys in plaid boxer shorts. “Can you charge this to the Helix House?” she said.

The Pro nodded. “One of our most active accounts.”

“I’m in,” Vicki said. “What the hell. I’ll call him
Brad
as much as I want.”

“Me too,” Charlotte said. “We’ll see who gets the roofies this time.”

They turned to Anne-Janet, who was just then feeling such a mess of grief balk in her throat, she could not talk. She’d heard it said that a girl whose father wrecks her becomes a woman no man can reach, and so far her experience had borne this out with depressing accuracy. Thing was, she wasn’t just unreachable; she didn’t know how to reach anyone else, either. What she’d just done at the Helix House? It underscored the bottom line: She was heartbroken. All the sentiment that attached itself to the condition was in play, with the caveat that the offending party was her dad and that instead of suffering acutely and with foreknowledge that she’d get over it, she hurt with moderation and diligence. A tide erodes the coast, the glaciers will melt; hers was just a slow assailing of the big things—the heart things—whose demise would change the world. Only not today. Tomorrow either. Who could go on like this? She was lonely beyond what she could endure.

She signed on the dotted line.

“So what do you need?” the Pro asked. “Just so I can get a sense of it.”

“A lock on the door,” Anne-Janet said. “A twin bed, a kid’s room, and a lock on the door.”

“Sure thing,” the Pro said, checking her computer screen. “Only it seems like some people are looking for you. You and three others.”

“That’s okay,” Anne-Janet said. “All I need is a lock. So that when your actor tries to get in, he can’t. After that, anyone who wants to find me won’t have any problem at all.”

Ned Hammerstein, begin on a small scale and end grandly.

Some people had wives and kids and the parents who’d given them life. Other people had a Lear jet forty-five-thousand feet up, a childhood plane, the
Bernard,
which they’d outfitted for cloud seeding and weather modification. Thus Ned, flying away or flying to, a hegira turned pilgrimage for a twin sister who more than likely would not give a shit to find out he was alive and might even fear the responsibility once she did.

“Cheer up,” his mother said, as if she could know; she had not looked at him in hours. Busy, busy. Touring the cargo bay, ransacking plastic bags for utensils and napkins and cold cuts and fruit. They were just over Colorado Springs, a couple of hours to go.

She held up two canteens, “Coke? OJ?” and looked hopeful. Feed the boy, curb his wrath.

He stretched his legs but didn’t get far. The bay was stuffed with kegs of acetone and silver iodide, dry ice, ammonium nitrate, urea, and some beat-up NEXRAD equipment. He’d painted the plane himself, attempting to render the original cover art of
Cat’s Cradle
—hands plus string loomed over a cityscape at night—but producing a slop of color that passed for abstraction in some circles but not in most. The wings were fitted with racks and flares that looked like the tines of a comb, and under each wing, giant cigar tubes of acetone–silver iodide—smoke generators—once the standard for seeding an updraft, provided you wanted rain.

Milanos on a paper plate, arranged in a crop circle. He took one to make her happy. For the fifth time, she asked about his health, and whether English Breakfast was okay, because she had Earl Grey in her fanny pack, so if he wanted Earl Grey, just say so. She dropped a spoon, then another while bending for the first, and throughout refused help, saying, apropos of nothing, “Your father’s doing well,” while pointing vaguely at the cockpit. He noticed her hands. The fingers were spindly, the skin thin but loose about the knuckles, and capped with nails corned-beef pink. He noticed the rest. Her cheeks were seasoned brown—liver spots and the bronzer she used to conceal them—and, where once showed the natural crimps of skin from nose to dimples, two ruts trafficked her tears so well, it was like city planning had landed on her face.