12 Bliss Street (17 page)

“Is anyone in there? I can see lights,” the woman shouted.

Lou and Nicola jumped up at the same time and Nicola ran to the door and didn’t even think but opened it without looking to see who it was—a woman in trouble, that’s all she knew. As the door opened the woman seemed to fall inside.

It was Robert’s sister. She was holding a suitcase and a laptop computer and her face was swollen from crying.

“Oh my God, he’s dead,” Carmen said. She was sobbing. “He’s dead, Robert’s dead.”

Sixteen

She had lovely
wide hips and small breasts and a small waist and she told him that she tried and tried to take some inches off her thighs but her body didn’t work that way—“it all goes from my breasts,” she told him at dinner, “that’s the first place that shrinks.”

Three hours later he was watching her through the viewfinder. It was true about her breasts. Her face now was calm and trancelike, in the stage he liked the best. Her fingernails were blue.

She lay on her back on the bed, barely conscious, and Chorizo moved the camera in for a close-up of her face, her brown eyes hidden under half-closed lids, her lips pale, her face pale, her naked shoulders pale, pale. Panning in and out: the close-up, the long body shot, the longer shot of two bodies, a man and a woman’s, on the bed.

They were not naked. They were not even touching. Chorizo pulled back for another shot of the two of them. He could see how filmmakers got off on this: making other people see things the way they were seeing them; the way they experimented with seeing them. Moving his fingers over the camera buttons, opening and shutting the audience’s eyes, moving them into position: you’re looking in from the doorway, now you’re on the ceiling peering down.

It’s a physical thing, Chorizo was thinking, what you do to the ones who watch what you do.

He pulled the small slick gray knob forward and back with his thumb and said to the boy, “Now touch the fabric.”

The boy moved toward the girl but it was clear he was not very interested. Later he would shoot up next to his girlfriend Marlina on her Navajo bedspread, and much later they would fall asleep chastely, side by side. These days what they had was more intimate than sex, based as it was on mutually assured survival. The boy was wearing a white T-shirt and briefs and he lazily pulled on the spaghetti strap of the girl’s embroidered silk top. Chorizo could see old needle marks that peppered the backs of his thighs. He kept the camera off that. The bedspread was deep blue and red, the pillowcases yellow. Chorizo liked lots of colors for these shots. The room was well-lit but with thick black curtains; still, he could hear noises from the outside, a steady stream of talking and laughing and shouting and sometimes the breaking of bottles. There was a popular club across the street and an all-night diner on the corner. It was just about eight o’clock.

“Ricky,” Chorizo ordered.

The boy was lazy, and the girl was already asleep. Technically, comatose. He wished he could remember her name. Lake, was that it? River? Rive? When he had told her the story of the crocodile and the monkey she had fixed her brown eyes on his mouth as if watching the words themselves, living creatures that sprang from his lips. He had said, “The story is a wonderful example of what you need to succeed: courage and faith and luck.

“What you are missing,” he said to the girl, “is luck.”

She had smiled then, a crooked kind of acceptance. Did she actually understand him? Most of them didn’t understand by then. But he would swear there was something in—Rive, was it?—there was something in her that grasped his meaning. Grasped it, accepted it, let it go.

“Ricky,” he said again.

The boy stirred, then pulled on the straps of her chemise again. The girl showed no response. There would be a moment when the body stiffened; it actually seemed to grow hard in an instant. The death instant. Maybe it wasn’t so much hard as still; very very still. Riva? Was her name Riva?

Chorizo panned back for another shot of the two of them. The moment was coming. He had given her two pills but they were working fast. He was a little afraid the moment would get here too soon.

*   *   *

Carmen was sitting
on Nicola’s couch sobbing in gulps while Nicola watched her, trying to think of what she could possibly say. Only a few minutes before she had been sitting in the same spot with her legs entwined in Lou’s. Now here was Carmen with her head down, her hair over her face. Lou had turned off the music. Right now he was half-sitting on the couch arm with a glass of water in one hand and his other hand on his knee. After a minute, when she seemed to have quieted down a little, he touched Carmen’s shoulder and she looked up and took the glass then she gave it back without drinking. She gulped some air and put her head down and everything started all over again.

“Oh dear,” Lou said.

Nicola gently pulled Carmen’s hair back behind her shoulders. She almost said, It’s all right, but she stopped herself because of course it wasn’t.

The sister, she was thinking. She must really be the sister.

What could she say to her? After a while Carmen’s breath came back and her sobs began to slow down. Nicola stroked her hair and Carmen said, hiccuping, “You must really be wondering.” She took the water Lou gave her and wiped her eyes with her fingers and Nicola went into the bathroom for a wet washcloth wondering, Should I offer her something stronger to drink? She put her fingers beneath the tap waiting for the spray to get colder. She had a few bottles of beer, but that didn’t seem right.

When she walked back to the room she tried to think what she would want to hear if their positions were reversed. The clock ticked loudly over the mantelpiece and Carmen took the washcloth without looking at Nicola and held it over her eyes. What would I want someone to say, Nicola wondered?

She said, “Carmen, we’re going to help you.”

At that Lou looked over at her.

“What,” she said, meeting his stare.

“We should find out what’s going on first,” he told her.

“Of course. We find out what happened. Then we fix it,” Nicola said.

“I agree we need to help, but…”

“But?”

“We really need to find out what’s going on.”

“Look at this woman,” she said.

Carmen was still holding the washcloth over her eyes. She took it off and dried her face on her sleeve.

“I’ll get you a towel,” Lou said.

“No, wait.” Carmen took a breath and drank some water. “I know you’re wondering and I want to explain,” she began. “Robert always said…” She hiccuped and started to cry again then tried to stop herself.

“It’s all right,” Lou said. “You don’t need to talk.”

“No,” Carmen said. “I want … you must really be wondering. I want to tell you.”

“Well, take your time,” Lou told her.

Carmen took a breath and almost smiled. “What a nice guy. He’s a nice guy,” she said to Nicola. “Is he your boyfriend?”

“We were just sort of getting to that,” Nicola said.

“Oh, Christ. Did I…? I mean here you were having a nice evening, a date—was it a date?”

“Yes,” Lou said.

“And I show up,” Carmen said.

“Stop apologizing,” Nicola said. “We can pick all that up again whenever.”

“And I barge in, a total stranger.”

“Stop,” Nicola said again. “Look, I’m going to take the washcloth away if you don’t stop.”

“Because Robert always told me if anything happened, if anything strange or frightening or just anything, I don’t know, anything happened I should come to this house. This cottage. I’d be safe here, he said.”

“Safe here?” Nicola asked.

“So I barge right in because I didn’t know what else to do after I found … I found him … he was sitting in his TV chair with his eyes open…” Carmen began losing her voice. “But I don’t believe he killed himself,” she said, losing control.

Lou and Nicola looked at each other. Killed himself?

“I don’t … I don’t want to cry,” Carmen said.

“But you should be crying,” Nicola said. “Robert is your brother. You should be crying.” She took Carmen’s hand. The clock ticked loudly; it was just after eight.

“Listen, why don’t you lie down,” she said. “Whenever you want, you talk to us, you tell us what happened. But first I’m going to make you some tea. And then after that we’re going to feed you. And after that we’re going to help you.” She looked at Lou. “Aren’t we?” she said.

“Oh my God,” Lou said, getting up suddenly.

“What?”

“The soup,” he said.

*   *   *

But Chorizo needn’t
have worried; as it turned out the timing was perfect. It was dark now and slowly the sounds from the street increased as more and more people left restaurants and headed for the clubs. Chorizo looked through the camera lens.

“Awakening is to know what reality is not,” he said aloud. That was good; he liked that. A pity he would have to delete the soundtrack. Later he would add music, then convert it all to quicktime. Last time he did Brian Eno. This time, who knows, some retro seventies band? A big-hair band? She had a seventies look with her puffy hair, her wide-cut blue jeans. Not that she was wearing blue jeans now.

He could definitely picture a seventies soundtrack. Something light and frivolous. A good juxtaposition, he was thinking, as she died. Not that he thought of himself as an artist. He thought of himself as a businessman.

A businessman with a wife in trouble.

“It’s time,” he told Ricky.

He looked at the girl. Beneath the overhead light a thin stream of dust moved down from the ceiling and he focused the camera for a moment on the girl’s pale face, what he could see of it. They had eaten garlicky Chinese food for dinner and afterwards they stopped for a mojito—rum mixed with mint and lime juice. His mouth felt slightly sour and he ran his tongue over his bottom teeth. “Awakening is to know,” he said again. But what did that mean exactly? She will not awaken, he thought. She will not know.

Ricky moved over and, without disengaging himself from her, picked up the scissors from the metal bedside table.

*   *   *

A half an
hour later Carmen combed her hair, then sat down with a cup of chamomile tea at Nicola’s small kitchen table, a forties-style metal table wedged into the corner of the room. The soup smelled delicious. Lou was cutting potato rosemary bread with a long serrated knife.

“I don’t know what to do,” Carmen said. She was still wearing her coat.

Nicola pulled out bowls from a cupboard. All her dishes suddenly seemed too bright and festive. What was this, dinner in Disneyland? She poured bubbly mineral water into tall Mexican glasses with stems.

“Drink this,” she said.

“Do you have anything stronger?” Carmen asked. So Nicola brought her a bottle of beer. Her mind kept circling around two things: curiosity about Robert, and trying to comfort Carmen. About Robert she wanted to know the particulars, but, about Carmen, she felt she could not ask.

Carmen said she wasn’t hungry, but Lou put soup and bread in front of her anyway and soon she was eating in small, rushed bites. Lou washed his hands and grated parmesan cheese over her soup, then took out a bottle of wine.

Nicola found three glasses; one she had to wash first. She thought of a story she had read in the news that day about how women don’t have the same fight or flight tendencies that men have; instead, this particular report claimed, they tend and befriend. Tend and befriend. Nicola hated that phrase the minute she read it and she hated it now, remembering.

Because she
would
fight. Even for Carmen, and who was Carmen? Pretty much a stranger, someone who might take my home away, okay, but also someone in trouble. It wasn’t Carmen’s fault that her brother tried to screw her, Nicola, over, and then went and killed himself or whatever it was that happened—in any case something that Carmen will now have to deal with for the rest of her life.

Nicola sat down beside her. Lou ladled out more soup from the pot and like a mother kept getting up from the table to fetch something else—the parmesan cheese, napkins, a pepper grinder.

After her second bowl Carmen slowed down and began talking.

She told them that her brother worked for a man he didn’t trust, someone she worked for too, and that last week Robert told her about this cottage and said that if anything ever happened she should come here. She would be safe here.

To be honest, Carmen said, she never trusted the man. Adam Lightwell was his name—but she didn’t think that was his real name.

“He looks like a sausage,” she said.

“What did you do for this man?” Lou asked.

Carmen tore the crust from her bread and added it to the pile on her plate. “Originally accounting. That’s what my degree is in.”

She said Lightwell and Robert had done a few deals together, some real estate stuff, but something strange happened over the last one—Carmen thought maybe Robert somehow lost his portion and became indebted to Lightwell as well. But Lightwell wasn’t only involved in real estate. He had ideas about making money on the Internet. Carmen found herself helping him set up a Web site, nothing very interesting except that he had her upload files through an anonymous remailer that went through Finland. That was when she realized he didn’t want to be traced.

Lou was standing at the table, stacking the empty soup bowls. “What’s a remailer?” he asked.

“A remailer,” Nicola explained, “is kind of like an e-mail go-between. You send your files, or your e-mail, to a server in a protected country—in this case Finland. The server in Finland consults its secret database and forwards your files to another server, one which you’ve set up beforehand, say one in California. Your Web site is on the server in California, and the files are published there. But if someone wants to know who uploaded the files onto the California Web site, all they get is the address of the anonymous server in Finland.”

“You leave no trail,” Lou said.

“You leave no trail,” Nicola agreed.

“It sounds fishy.” He turned to Carmen. “Weren’t you suspicious?”

“Well, but this is the Internet; so many people are a little crazy,” Carmen said. “You know—paranoid about privacy. That’s all I thought it was at first.”